


All This Dawn

by mymotheristherepublic



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Enjolras Survives, Alternate Universe - Grantaire Survives, Alternate Universe - Prouvaire Survives, Blood and Gore, Canon Era, M/M, Marius dies AU, Not everyone dies, Overdosing, Sexual Content, Suicide Attempt, and ill advised opium, except Marius, feat. Jean Valjean's fatherly instincts, flashback Jehan/Combeferre, fun with 19th century medical technology, this was a bad plot bunny that went way too far
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-06-05
Updated: 2016-04-29
Packaged: 2018-02-03 12:04:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 8
Words: 37,172
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1744067
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mymotheristherepublic/pseuds/mymotheristherepublic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The old man begins to shift his weight. “Perhaps I will come back another time. When you’re feeling more eloquent.”<br/>“You should have left me.”<br/>It is the first complex phrase he has forced from his lips. It stings in his mouth, costs him a few labored breaths and blossoming agony beneath his ribs. But he does not scream. He cannot allow that.<br/>His companion stands at last, sliding the bottle into the pocket of his black coat. “I did not.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

The last gunshot rang out five minutes before, and the one that killed the boy was perhaps within the hour. Jean Valjean does not forget a face easily. He remembers the unruly wisps of black hair, the pointed, almost timid looking features that froze upon laying eyes on him, the clothes that had once perhaps been fine, but were worn too many times to be so termed any longer. Sections of the green coat he wears are slick and black with blood, and the marks that spattered his cheeks like unorganized constellations are erased by smears of red.

He is held together by the barricade itself, his body pinned between a collapsed stack of crates and a chair his arm is still wrapped around. Any attempt to move him and the boy will be brought home in pieces. And despite the anger, despite the sudden fury rising in him, despite knowing his daughter is still there, aching for the boy lying, lifeless, before him, Jean Valjean cannot bear to carry back what remains of the young man he has heard called ‘Marius’.

And so he does not. He leaves him amongst the crumbling fortifications. It is far too late for the boy he should have never wished ill upon, but perhaps not for others. There were scads of young men here, too young for the guns they wielded or the burdens they shouldered, too young for him to allow them to die here--to accept that they had gone to their deaths willingly. But he looks about him and sees nothing but men as empty as the gun shells littered about them.

There is one, once thin and nervous and helping tend to the wounded, now slumped against an empty wine barrel, his hands limply clutching his jacket over the wound to his chest in a final, desperate attempt to stop the bleeding. There is the man who worked beside him in his leather apron, the broken glass of his spectacles cutting jagged lines down his cheek. And making a row with him are three others--one prematurely bald with his hand stretched towards the man against the wine barrel, one with rough fingers clutching his bloodied neck, one whom Valjean had witnessed pulling Marius into a tight embrace now face-down in the divots where paving stones were. Atop the barricade, they have yet to move a burly young man whose hands still cling to his rifle as if he were awaiting the National Guard to approach. Valjean still hears them moving about, wild foxes stalking the shadows until he sees a glimmer of their medals like flashes of predatory eyes in the night. They are waiting. Waiting for another flare of gunpowder from the last standing insurrectionist. Waiting for an arrest to make. But all around him is still, and the foxes must give way to vultures.

He checks each and every wrist for a pulse, each mouth for a sign of shallow breath. These are no longer the vivacious young men who surrounded him with rifles drawn. Those men are gone, perhaps altogether. He turns, faces the now torn facade of the cafe behind him. The shutters of the windows are splintered with stray bullets, the wooden front ripped to provide a front for the barricade. But this place, it meant something to them. Enough that they built their fortifications before it, that they elected to make it their final resting place as well.

He approaches, and it feels too sepulchral to profane with the mud and god knows what else caked onto his boots. The darkness consumes him when he crosses the threshold, steps over something that may be a floorboard or a limb. He is too used to unholy stenches to notice much as he pushes past the cavernous ruins where men must have drank, been merry, loved, paid for love at the least. Wind howls through the spaces within, and Jean Valjean proceeds into the black.

Further back, the air begins to clear. A single window has been forced open by a gunshot, swung out at an awkward, broken angle and letting in the faintest moonlight. He steps forward, feels a shard of broken glass grind under his shoe, knows that he is treading upon something slick and still warm. The worn soles of his boots almost make him slip, but he catches himself on an upturned table leg.

There is a certain heaviness in the air when one finds oneself in the presence of another living being. And while Valjean, feeling about in the dark, does not know where his target lies, he senses there is still a beating heart here, faint breath hovering about bloodless lips. As the crunch of crumbled glass ceases, he reaches for a wall, and his hand comes back wet. He rubs his fingers together. Blood. Still warm. Still thin. Silently, he kneels, tracing a long path of dampness down the wall until that dampness becomes a soaked mass of fabric beneath his palm. He lets it rest for a moment, closes his eyes.

Yes, there it is. That almost unrecognizable flutter of breath, of air still unconsciously flowing through lungs. He has lighted on a living being amongst this mass grave of men who had once awaited the light of next morning as eagerly as young boys. He searches on in the dim light, finds a waist to wrap his arm about, a head to support, legs to hang over his other arm. There is someone very much alive here, and he finds comfort in it. He has managed to scavenge from these ruins what little he can, be it Marius or no. He has not failed. A long lock of hair, matted with blood, brushes his skin, and Valjean steps into the light once more.

The jostling of his grasp as he approaches the door elicits a muffled groan from the form in his arms. He shushes them, gently as one would quiet a small child, places a calming hand upon the back of their neck without intending to, and thinks of his daughter. He feels a lengthy mass of curls against his forearm, like hers, but tangled, singed in odd places, soaked from several wounds. He does not want to think about her in this way, but he must, and he can do nothing but find a stray chair to duck into as someone passes the door of the cafe and calm the shaking body resting against his torso.

**-**

The tenants of the rooms once rented about the barricade have fled, many with their doors unlocked and their possessions still within. It takes Valjean longer to skirt through the streets, avoiding any other live beings within sight, than it does to find an empty bed. The occupants of this room will not be returning, judging from the frantically scrawled note to sell the space once more when the time is right.

He lays his delicate cargo across the floorboards--easier to clean than the bedsheets. It is a young man, he determines, entirely unconscious now, his shirt too saturated with blood to ascertain the location of his wounds. Valjean strips back his dark jacket, rips his already torn shirt down the center.

The wound on his stomach seems to be shallow, perhaps to have come from an angle. There is not much cushioning to have stopped it, but the bullet cleanly entered and exited below his ribs. One shot has cut through his left shoulder, and has exited as well. Better the bullets don't remain in him.

His other injuries are mostly grazes--bleeding, not dangerous, but there is still red pooling beneath him. Valjean carefully hooks his arm under him and rolls him onto his side.

The most severe of his afflictions is another shot. It has mutilated the flesh of the lowest dip of his back, painted his pale skin a thick scarlet. Valjean drags the man until his uninjured shoulder rests against the wall, and rips the sheet from the bed. The best he can manage is to wrap it about his waist, if only to slow the bleeding momentarily.

He may die tonight. The possibility has always been there, thick in the air like gunsmoke. Valjean pulls the makeshift tourniquet tight and takes a moment to clear the hair and blood from his patient's face.

He knows this man. Not ‘knows’ him, perhaps. But he has seen him. He has seen his face, severe and determined and yet angelic, staring down the men now lying dead in the street and assuring them their deaths would not be in vain, that his would not either. But the man had resolved to die. That was certain. He had seen barely more than two decades on this earth, and he knew well that his life needn't last longer. He would be a short, bright flash, like gunshot himself. He would fall young and full of glory.

Valjean rips a length of fabric from the young man’s shirt and ties it off about his shoulder. There is a certain reverence he feels, as if he were attending a priest in his final hours. He takes a limp hand and holds it firmly between his own. There is still a pulse pounding weakly in the veins of the man’s wrist. With utmost caution, he lifts him and lowers him onto the bed--he can do no more until morning.

There is one item in the pocket of the man's jacket, one identifying mark. A note.

__

_Citizen,_

_You have recovered the body of Julien Enjolras. Do not return to Marseille. Bury in Paris, wherever you may lay my comrades to rest. My possessions I leave to any who may find them._

The weight of breath begins to move the man’s breast more strongly. Air comes in shallow gasps, but come it does. Jean Valjean has allowed Marius to die today. Tonight, he has allowed this one to live.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A shoutout to my lunch group for a year, for not telling me writing an AU in which Marius died instead of Enjolras would be a terrible idea and would totally not become a sad-sack plot. And a special thanks to tumblr users pronetochaos, disorderlyopeningofchaos, and godbewithyouihavedone for proofing these first chapters.


	2. Chapter 2

Paris, at times, is a collection of loose connections. There are thin threads that bind all who have stepped foot in Paris, that keep them chained to this city and to one another. And in a moment, one must simply give those threads a small tug to produce the desired result.

Jean Valjean knows the man that wanders the streets below his temporary residence. He is followed by two uniformed men, whom he turns to as he kneels and examines the fallen revolutionaries that line narrow pathways. Every once in awhile, he hears the man mutter, “Dead,” as he turns away from one after another.

And so he waits. He sits on the edge of the bed, his thumb on the young man’s wrist--Enjolras, he remembers. His breathing has grown deeper. The evening saw his blood flow more slowly, and feeble noises begin to spill from his throat. At times, his fingers clench weakly. They flex in and out, the undersides of their nails stained with reddish brown crescents and their knuckles swollen and raw. His eyes remain closed to the daylight, but he is awake, he is alive. That is all Valjean can ask of him.

The man in the street finds himself, eventually, alone. He tips his hat to his former company and cleans his hands on the apron at his waist, but he is nervous. He is like any rational man believing himself to be the only live human in the vicinity. Valjean watches him wring his sweating palms and tuck his hair behind his ear, even when it is already out of his eyes. When he’s certain the man won't startle, he stands, takes a button from Enjolras's ruined coat, and lets it fall to the ground below.

The man looks up, shielding his eyes from the sun. He has more of a moustache than Valjean remembers. Some of his hair has been stricken with gray, but it is an unsuitably boyish red for the most part. When he finally catches sight of the old man in the window, he seems to understand that he must make as little of a scene as possible. And so he hikes up his leather bag on his shoulder, nods, and makes sure he is not followed before ascending the stairs.

His name is Guillaume, Valjean recalls as he reintroduces himself. He tended to Cosette once, for what turned out to be a minor cough, but he recalls the house on the Rue Plumet, and he remembers the old man, and he definitely remembers his sympathies when a bit of money finds its way into his hand.

“Who is this man?” he asks, opening his bag and laying out a multitude of small medical instruments on the unoccupied edge of the bed.

Valjean clutches the note in his pocket. “That is none of your concern.”

Guillaume’s thick brow knits into fantastic configurations as he leans over Enjolras and tentatively examines the edge of his shoulder wound. “Has he been awake at all? Spoken anything?”

“I believe he is somewhat conscious.”

“The unconscious are capable of movement in their sleep. If he were indeed awake, I believe there would have been some screaming involved. The boy’s sustained significant damage, and I must assume he was more than a passive participant in the recent troubles. One does not shoot at a mere bystander seven times. Lucky only two did anything more than graze.”

“Eight.”

Guillaume frowns and maneuvers around the bed. His already pallid face blanches, but silently, with a doctor’s steady touch, he kneels and touches the blood-soaked sheet about Enjolras’s waist.

“I’ll need to see it before I can make any--”

Wordlessly, Valjean undoes his hasty knot and lets the fabric fall.

The prognosis: He will live, likely, given time to heal. And that time does not appear short. His wounded shoulder will require rest to regain full usage, but granted he survive, he should expect it. At Guillaume’s touch to his back, Enjolras gives his first real flinch and half-hearted cry, and Valjean is given a small bottle of liquid in amber glass, “For if the howling becomes intolerable. Mix it with something first, don’t kill the boy.”

There is no response from his legs. Guillaume does what he can to elicit one--taps on his knee, takes them between his hands and bends them, touches his back to make him cringe once more. His lower half lies inert. Valjean stands against the wall as Guillaume cleans and sutures Enjolras’s wounds, observing the attending physician's drawn mouth and narrowed eyes. Enjolras squirms uneasily. His hands still grasp at nothing so tangible as air, and between childish whines at the prick of Guillaume’s needle, his mouth attempts to form words he loses before they leave his lips.

Valjean steps forward and splays his palm on the mattress. It takes only a brief moment for Enjolras to reach out and take a single callused finger in his hand. He exhales with a certain serenity, tucks his head down until his curtain of blond curls covers his face, and Jean Valjean thinks of his daughter once more.

“I don't know if I should apologize,” Guillaume says as he finishes dressing Enjolras's shoulder, “as I'm unsure you even know the man, much less plan to stay with him.” He draws a deep breath as he stands. “If he wakes, he will, in all likelihood, remain an invalid. The bullet--” Guillaume opens his fist, displaying a gory metal casing. “--pierced a section of his spine. Severed the connection. Use of his legs will be minimal, at best.”

Valjean looks down at the half conscious young man still clutching his finger, strokes his hair back as he stirs again.

“You'd do best to relocate.” Guillaume’s voice is at once stern and deliberate. “They'll come looking if they know anyone is still here. God forbid you should have to move him with the Guard on the hunt. They'll sniff him out like hounds.”

“You won't tell them,” Valjean says. It is not a question. And Guillaume understands.

“I wish you both luck.”

With that, Guillaume is gone before Valjean can slip another franc into his pocket for security.

Enjolras pulls Valjean's hand closer to his chest and mutters indistinctly.

“I am...truly sorry,” he says, unsure if he is heard at all.

The boy doesn't seem to notice anything but the sound of his voice. His fingers tighten, and he gasps between clenched teeth. Perhaps he is still not aware of the situation. Perhaps all he is conscious enough to know is the pain seizing his body and the June sun on his back. He hopes the sunlight is some comfort.

-

Jean Prouvaire had never been known for thinking things through. Nothing had ever seemed quite enough like a bad idea to stop him before it was too late. The opium den was not ill-advised until he was already sweating it out in bed the next day. Visiting the country was relaxing until he remembered that, indeed, his family still lived there. The streets at night were beautiful until he had a black eye and no money in his purse. Scrawling out drunken love poetry was divine until it was discovered.

And then, once more, it was divine.

Perhaps he had never been known for thinking things through, but there was always Combeferre. With an understanding smile, and a shake of his head, and often a, “God’s sakes, Jehan, couldn’t you have taken someone with you?” He called him Jehan, more than the others. Because logically, if he preferred it, it should be his name, shouldn’t it? Besides, Combeferre said, he had a soul as old as Notre Dame herself. Why not a name as well?

Jehan often hoped the mass of freckles across his cheeks covered outlandish shades of red he must have turned when Combeferre was poetical. It was a rare thing. Philosophical, often, but poetical--there was a bit of his heart showing through. And it was rarer still to see that small flush of pink wash over his face for even a moment. If Jehan was a soul as old as Notre Dame, he joked that Combeferre was as young as the blossoms that shed their petals into the Seine in spring. And when he did, he remembered Combeferre’s light tug on his wrist as they walked the banks once on the journey back from the Musain.

“You’ll fall one of these days,” he’d said, “and I don’t know how to swim.”

Jehan had obliged and stepped away from the edge. “Such a beautiful time of year to drown, though.”

He needed someone like Combeferre, someone to pull him back from his awful ideas before he realized how miserable they would make him. Combeferre told him of worldly things, things that were not grounded in the metaphysical--of the train tracks newly spanning across the meadows, of sending messages through wires, of the veins that gave man life and the light that gave him color. He was someone who understood his dead languages and spoke them into his mouth with a strangled fervor and heaviness and a touch of music as well.

That, he admitted, was the fault of those damned love poems.

It was another night after the Musain, having listened to enough debate about the merits of Rousseau to keep him drinking longer than Grantaire, who had been too busy with counterpoints to swig his wine more than a few times. He needed an arm to walk home on, and he was not at all protesting if that arm was attached to one Monsieur Combeferre. Combeferre was at his most painfully scientific drunk. In the backstreets, he believed men would one day speak over the wires they tapped codes into now. On the river banks, he was fascinated by the taught tendons he watched flex beneath the back of his hand, and took Jehan's own to compare.

“I could practically use you for an anatomical model,” he mused, tracing the distinct structures of Jehan's left hand. “You can see the veins and the joints and--everything.”

Jehan smirked. “A writer's hand. Overworked a bit.”

“You're left handed?”

“The devil's hand, they say. That's where they get ‘sinister’ from. _Sinestra._ The Latin word for ‘left’. The old augurs straining their necks in Jupiter’s temple would have slit a calf’s throat for good harvests if the birds dared fly left. Perhaps in another age I would have been Beelzebub’s servant, would have been flayed, drawn and quartered, reduced to ashes like Jeanne d’Arc. They don't give a shit about left hands today. Pity.”

“No need for vulgarity regarding your lack of being gored alive.”

Even in the dark, a slight flush of rose colored the tops of his cheekbones.

Somewhere between left hands, further discussions of the flights of birds, the migration of the Merlin--“I always enjoyed seeing them in winter as a boy,” Combeferre said. “Fancied myself a bit of a falconer until one clawed my arm when I was ten.”--a brief detour to Arthurian lore, and Jehan’s tales of his childhood visit to the English countryside, Combeferre forgot to leave the conversation at the doorstep. He followed him up the dank stairwell, up to the landing that since last week’s rain had begun to smell of rotting wood and mice, to the door of his room.

“It occurs to me,” Combeferre said, “that I have never seen where our dear poet whiles away his hours. I could only assume it was amongst the wild things.”

“The vermin in the walls can be quite wild on occasion,” Jehan replied. “They chatter away like a salon of philosophers when I’m trying to sleep, plant all the best ideas in my head.”

“You should have your little salon taken care of.”

“Please, Combeferre, don’t squander the second Enlightenment. I prefer to be an enlightened despot, the Frederick the Great of rats, the Leopold of mice, than spend my nights alone.”

Combeferre rested his shoulder on the door. At its sudden loud creaking, he stumbled back and caught himself on the wall. “Enjolras would never approve of your rodential tyranny.”

Jehan slid past him and fumbled with the door. Curse his devil’s hand. Or the wine. Or both. “We’ve seen well enough tonight that Enjolras keeps Monsieur Jean-Jacques for his bedfellow. He has too many ethical quandaries of his own to concern himself with Jean Prouvaire The First of the Latin Quarter.”

At last, with a last shove of the side of his arm, Jehan managed to pry the door open.

Maybe he did live among wild things after all. His room was smaller than a wealthy family’s only son should expect to live in, and he had made it smaller yet with the addition of a writing desk, an old lute he had acquired from the auctioning of a dead man’s estate, a taxidermied raven that had seemingly begun to molt even in death, and various papers covering the wooden floorboards. There was hardly room at all for his bed, which was never in any state of array. Beds were made to be slept in, not looked at. Beds were also, apparently, to be piled with books in the places he did not need to position his slender form.

“You have seen it,” he said, turning on his heel. “What is your will with it? Do you still disapprove of my benevolent dictatorship? Shall we take a democratic vote on the matter and set about liberating the populace?”

Combeferre, still grinning unabashedly, rested his weight against the doorframe. He had not taken time to fix his loose cravat, or the spectacles that sat crooked on his nose.

“I have never read your poetry either.”

Jehan sank to the edge of the bed. “You’ve read some. The one I wrote about Apollo and Diana--”

“You have to have others, my friend,” Combeferre said. “It would be awfully strange to think you write of ancient gods and nothing of yourself.”

Jehan kicked his feet out absentmindedly.

Combeferre stepped inside without closing the door. “I don’t mean to sound bothersome.”

“No. But you have said yourself I’m old, and rather odd, so perhaps they have been about me all along. Close the door, if you plan to be much longer.”

That sounded rude. He made sure to add, “Thank you,” in a sweeter tone after Combeferre did so.

“What are your floors littered with?” Combeferre asked.

“Just that. Poetry.”

What he had not anticipated--perhaps he should have--was that the man would deign to pick it up. His pulse beat harshly against the sides of his neck, and he attempted to quell it with his sweating palm. He hoped he was hidden enough behind darkness and his own barrier of hair--not near as long as Enjolras’s, but an irrational red color and sitting delicately on his shoulders.

Shakespeare had his Dark Lady, his Fair Youth. Jean Prouvaire had his Scientist, whose hands fluttered like the ephemeral wings of his entomological specimens. Who viewed the world through glass like the camera obscura he was so immensely fascinated with. Who had perfected the exact, almost mathematically calculated method of speaking over the crackling of revolutionary fire without so much as raising his voice.

His Scientist, whose face was now more scarlet than chaste pink as he dug through the layer of failed poems that carpeted the floor--half-finished odes to the curl of his lips and the curve of his leg and how his mistress, whoever she was, must have been the happiest woman in Paris.

“I write drunk, often,” Jehan said, as if it would somehow make sense of things. “Once or twice on...other substances.”

“I don’t have one.”

Jehan did not look up. He continued to watch his feet, kicking back and forth, as he clutched the frame of his bed and tried once more to slow his pulse, his breathing. “Don’t have what?”

“A mistress. I-- Not once. I have never--... Don’t misunderstand me, Jehan, but I feel as if I’m going to be ill. I don’t know if that’s the wine, or the...”

“If you do it outside my door, I’m certain it could only add to the charm of this place.”

Combeferre held the pages in his hand carefully, as if they would break if he touched them any more than he had, or if he dared let go of them. “If Jean Prouvaire The First, King of the Latin Quarter rats, would allow a lowly republican such as myself to speak for a moment, I would be most humbled.”

It came about strangely, but Jehan did not suppress a small laugh as Combeferre bowed his head. “Speak, if you must.”

Combeferre did not take his opportunity. He stood for a moment, his eyes flitting between the papers he held and the man sitting before him. One wrist fell loose, and his hand drifted in the space between them. Jehan banished all thoughts of hesitation before taking it and tracing the lines of Combeferre’s palm with his thumb. He felt a strange tightness in the pit of his stomach, some vague stirring of heat, and all things overcome when another set of lips pressed slowly to his.

**-**

Jehan’s home is still not far from the Musain. He moved rooms shortly after Combeferre’s first visit, after a leak in the roof had proved hazardous to both his health and his work. The walk is shorter, but it no longer takes him by the river. Still, he used to drag Combeferre to the banks after every meeting, if for nothing else, to feel him still clutch his wrist as if only that kept him ashore.

“Excuse me.”

He looks up, and a man with a leather satchel and a graying mustache a shade browner than his own hair is standing above him. Jehan does not move from his place, kneeling on the pavement outside a block of rented rooms.

“Morning, monsieur,” he manages to sputter.

The man does not recognize him.

“What is your business here?”

Jehan notices his hand is still in the pocket of his coat and withdraws it, hoping no spot of red comes with it. “I am an observer. Natural curiosity.”

“Not a pickpocket?”

He shakes his head. This man does not recognize him, but he does not believe him either.

Jehan decides to give a little. “I thought perhaps to find a relative of mine, but it appears they have taken the men away. I had hoped if he was not among the living, I may return him to our family.”

The man, at last, gives a sympathetic nod. “Tell me who. I may be able to work out a favor.”

It takes him a minute to decide. He is best off not naming one of the three most wanted, though he would rather give him Combeferre’s name than anything. No, he must be more cautious than that. He must retain some anonymity.

Jehan clears his throat. “Nicolas Grantaire. My cousin.”

“No such man.”

Jehan stands, though everything below his knees feels numb and aching all at once. He clasps his shaking hands together at his waist. “I know he exists, monsieur. He is my cousin, and he was at the barricades--”

“Whether he was or no,” the man answers firmly, “I checked the pockets of every man we identified, found all their names. His was not among them.

“There were nine rebels whom we understand led this revolt. Six were found, one known missing, two presumed dead, of the which your cousin is one. I am most sorry, my boy, but I shall call on you if we come upon him.”

Jehan looks the man over--the instruments sticking from his bag, the slight red tint to his hands, his collected nervousness--and feels suddenly nauseous. The arms he holds at his midsection tighten about it, and it takes him a herculean amount of effort to continue breathing. “Please, do not contact me. Our family has shame enough.”

The man glances down at the lump in Jehan’s pocket, but he says nothing to acknowledge it. “May I learn your name at least?”

“I apologize, monsieur, but you may not.”

“Very well then.” He tips his hat and skirts past.

Jehan does not watch him go. He lets himself slump against the wall of the building, covers the lower half of his face, and knows he can’t allow himself to weep. But the summer winds have not yet lifted the smell of gunpowder.

He hates gunpowder. He hates how its sharp perfume still sticks to his skin, and how it stung in his nostrils as he faced a line of dead-eyed men, and how their own hands reeked of infernal sulfur, and how his were no better once he pulled the trigger.

**-**

In his two previous years knowing Combeferre, Jehan had not fully comprehended that he could enjoy him this much without speaking. His languid early morning touch lighted on the trenches between Jehan’s ribs and the contour of his hip that almost vanished from existence if he were not on his side. He was no longer philosophical, or poetical when he touched--he was visceral. His lips were soft on the marks he had left, his breath warm on the back of his neck.

When he rose, Jehan held onto him as long as he could, until Combeferre’s fingertips slipped out of his grasp and he groaned into his pillow.

“We cannot all be libertines,” Combeferre said, and Jehan knew the man was smiling without a single glance at his face. “If I am to further my education, I must attend class on a somewhat regular basis.”

He needn’t do more than connect with Jehan’s bare shoulder to turn him over into the harsh light.

“I must look an awful sight.” Jehan rubbed his eyes. “But I am glad you would have me, my dear Scientist, for one night. Make yourself a nest among the rats here, if you wish to stay again.”

Combeferre, pausing in adjusting his necktie as he dressed, bent over the bed once more. He kissed as a man who never had need to do so before, as one entranced by the very vulnerable humanity of such an act. All this to say Jehan could have remained beneath those lips, and he could have set aside his poetry if only to live it in that moment.

At last, Combeferre set his spectacles squarely atop the bridge of his nose. “I presume we will meet again.”

Jehan smirked. “Never again. I fear I shall die here if you leave me. But do not fear. It shall only be a small death.”

The yellow sun flashed white upon the glass hiding Combeferre’s eyes. “I doubt it not.”

-

Jean Prouvaire, a soul perhaps not as old as Notre Dame, but once as vibrant as the colors that fall from her windows, touches the twisted wire and glass in his coat pocket and descends into Paris.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A thank you again, to the previously mentioned editors, and to you people who are probably wishing you never got me into this fandom right about now.


	3. Chapter 3

Tincture of opium does not stop the pain, but it dulls Enjolras enough that the bookshelf just out of his reach is the most fascinating thing since his first visit to Paris. He cannot see the titles from here, and some of them do not possess titles, but his eyes refuse to tear themselves away. Perhaps he could read one. When he hears footsteps, he reaches towards the shelf and does the best he can to inquire about something to pass the time with, but his throat is dry, and his words feel heavy in his mouth.

It does not occur to him in this time--a week, two weeks?--to wonder where he is. He is, seemingly, existent. He is alive. He is capable of blinking and grabbing and making sound. There is a ceiling above him, and a bed beneath him, and a door somewhere he cannot crane his neck far enough to see. The thick murk in his head doesn’t allow him to remember much of the man who comes through that door. Only that he is old, and the drink he doles out is vaguely bittersweet. That is the opium, he discerns in a clearer moment. He was given it once before, when a man at an inn broke his nose, and he was advised by some distant face in the dregs of his memory not to self medicate.

He was moved, perhaps. This does not feel like the place he first woke. The air here is cool on his skin, the bed is not hard, the air smells at times of flowers. The second figure who begins to appear at the door, a woman in black, brings a small vase of roses and sets them on an empty space in the bookshelf. She smiles, but Enjolras feels some terrible sadness caged behind her lips. He can do nothing. And so he reaches for her hand, if she will take it. She never does.

The old man comes with his amber bottle, and Enjolras should not be this awake. He feels the sweat beading on his skin, hair sticking to the sides of his neck, the dull ache in his temples, the stirrings of sharp pains in his shoulder and the center of his stomach. The sensations come in waves. He grinds his teeth and lets his fingernails rip at the bedsheets until he finds the lip of the bottle at his mouth.

His heart strikes hard against his ribs, and he finds the strength in that brief instant to push it away.

For the first time, Enjolras sees the man’s face. He is old, but his features are firm. Black eyes gaze from beneath his thick white brow, and Enjolras reads his confusion in the configuration of creases that cut through his dark skin. His angular jaw clenches.

“Please,” he says, and Enjolras does not expect the pleading in his voice, “it’s been--”

“Don’t.”

The man leans back. “I don’t want you to hurt. We have done this every day, you’ve cooperated well.”

Cooperated. No. He does not remember agreeing to this. Agreeing to be here. Agreeing to the sickly taste of laudanum down his throat. Agreeing to the unreachable bookcase and the girl in black who refuses to look at him and...

Living.

He did not consent to live. Of all other thoughts congealed and stagnant in his mind, this stands above all else. Enjolras is alive, and by all his calculating, all the faded shades of reminisces still clawing for a purpose in his memory, he should not be. He does not deserve to be if...

Not if they are dead. Enjolras has seen death--that cold, marble stare skyward, blood pouring between once desperate fingers, the absence of breath from speechless lips. They are there, in the streets he once traversed with his arm about the shoulder of this friend or that, marveling at an odd turn of phrase or the alignment of the stars above their heads, speaking wondrously of the freedom all mused they would give their own lives to ensure for those lives yet unbegun.

He recalls a guttural laugh. A grin over the neck of a bottle. A teasing tug of a cravat. A friendly jab in the ribs. A call for a toast. A shout in some foreign tongue. A tipped chair. A puff of pipe smoke. And he wants to give names to them. He wants to honor them, somehow, and he is too alive to do so.

“Don’t,” he repeats.

The old man puts a stopper in his bottle and straightens to his full, massive height. “You shall be in pain within the hour. I don’t mean to trouble you, but--”

“Let me.”

There is something hidden about these people. They both gape at him as if lost, and he knows there are things behind that door he does not see.

“It is not any more noble of you to suffer,” the man says. “Your life has been spared. You may as well heal comfortably.”

Enjolras shakes his head. He wants to do more, to speak, to converse in something other than the inarticulate noises that, for these last unbearable days, have been his only words. There is a frantic heat welling in his abdomen. He raises his hand again and makes a slow, speechless gesture as he concentrates on finding a word, a single word, and this should not be as difficult as the lingering fog of opium is making it.

Finally, he clears his throat with a sharp pain in his stomach and says, “Water.”

He doesn’t know how much time passes before the man comes back with an overfull metal cup. Enjolras grabs it before the man raises it to his mouth for him. Most of it spills down his bared chest, but the water that makes it down his throat is miraculous.

He gasps. The air no longer scratches his throat. “Stay. Please. I want...”

“To speak to me?”

Enjolras nods.

The man lowers himself slowly onto the edge of the bed. For all his mass, he alights with a careful delicacy that must require some strain. “Have you remembered? The night I found you?”

“I don’t--... I have to--... No.”

“You will, and for that I do not know what to say to you.” He places a massive hand on Enjolras’s forearm. “Calm. You’re working yourself into a panic, boy.”

Enjolras does not notice the desperate heaving of his lungs until then. He bites his lip and does all he can to stop, but there is still sweat tracing the slopes of his face and a heaviness weighing down upon his midsection.

The old man begins to shift his weight. “Perhaps I will come back another time. When you’re feeling more eloquent.”

“You should have left me.”

It is the first complex phrase he has forced from his lips. It stings in his mouth, costs him a few labored breaths and blossoming agony beneath his ribs. But he does not scream. He cannot allow that.

His companion stands at last, sliding the bottle into the pocket of his black coat. “I did not.”

-

Their names come at a price. By noon, he is shaking, the pillow beneath his head drenched and cold with perspiration. Enjolras still does not allow himself to scream, but he cannot help the strangled cries that mar his breathing.

The first man who gave him tincture of opium was named Joly, who sat him on a table and gave him his handkerchief to stop the blood streaming from his nostrils and chided his friend--Lesgle, reaching towards Joly even in death and, no, he will not let himself think of that again--to tie Enjolras’s hair back.

“Don’t seek it out,” he’d said. “One dose and you’ll soothe the pain, one dose too many and you’ll become a Romantic.”

A splash of wine sloshed across Joly’s face, and from a nearby chair, a man with an empty glass and yellow stockings like an unfashionable troubadour muffled his laughter behind a delicate hand.

“You see what I mean, then.” Joly wiped the flush of purple from his cheek. “Our dear Prouvaire here is already half mad.”

Enjolras laughed at that, too hard, and a splatter of blood had dripped onto the beige leg of his pants.

“Glad to see he still has his sparkling sense of humor,” Lesgle said, pulling his hair back with a final tug at a strip of cloth he had torn from a dishrag. “I would have a touch more sympathy for you, Enjolras, if you hadn’t struck him first.”

He deserved it. Why, he doesn’t remember. But Enjolras had good reason to almost break his hand against the man’s jaw and end his evening staring at his friends’ faces leaning over him with spots of color flashing in and out of his vision. He had tasted blood in his mouth and smiled despite it. Something had been worth it to him.

Enjolras finally cedes to the laudanum again when he can no longer bite his lip against the pain in his stomach. The girl comes to administer it, and he chokes on the taste, but it’s better than this. Anything to dull his senses again. Anything to force him back to sleep. He will have memories again when he has not endured this for a good while longer. He lets his hand fall close to her again, but she has darted from the room before he opens his eyes again to see her.

Enjolras has found that sort of thing comforting since childhood--feeling the weight of another hand in his, holding fast to something solid and real and knowing there is another person on the other end. It was the last sensation before the bullets struck, a hand pressed to his, a strange calm, a half-formed smile as his fingers entwined with…

No. His eyes are heavy, and his thoughts are lead. The sun is setting orange and gold over the bookshelf, and over the gilded letters across the spines. Some friend of his would have appreciated it. This he knows, as he lethargically ambles towards sleep.

-

“There was someone with me,” he tells the old man.

He shakes his head and begins to unwind the saturated bandages about Enjolras’s shoulder. “I saw no one.”

It is only the fatigue that keeps his mouth shut. Enjolras hums a single, strained note to himself as the man pulls his new wrappings taught, digging his nails into the soft heels of his palms.

He was not alone. Once, perhaps, having at last found the steadiness in his legs and the strength in his voice.

_Do you wish your eyes bandaged?_

_No._

At least they had offered him one last decency.

_Was it really you who killed the sergeant of artillery?_

There had been the stiff weight of a carbine in his hands, an order to the men with weapons drawn to kill him having barely left his lips. A man before him. A man who had not taken his warning. A man who would soon be dead at his feet.

_Yes._

He had shot the sergeant of artillery, and other men before him, and he would have his retribution. Enjolras would suffer, if it had not been for that suddenly loud and, yet, strikingly tender voice that rose above the death knoll of clicking flintlocks. And in that singular moment, as the men before him parted, he was thankful his eyes were unbound.

“He was there,” Enjolras says. “He was…”

Shot. He was shot, but the words are beating against Enjolras’s chest and he looks into the old man’s eyes and he cannot say them.

“You could have taken him.”

The old man purses his thin lips. “I’m sorry. But he was not--”

“He didn’t need to die!” The sound of his own voice startles Enjolras himself. He pants, sinking back into the cushions behind him.

The man glances away, cleaning his bloodied hands on a rag. Enjolras scrutinizes him until he can no longer keep his eyes open. He needs him to _look_ at him. He needs him to _see him_ and know that he does not deserve this, that there was another man he could have dragged back to this place and whose wounds he could have cleaned and whose life--

That man is dead. Death was his choice, and he took it with a sort of heartfelt, bullheaded courage Enjolras could never muster.

“Rest now.” The man stands and shoves the stained rag into the seemingly endless pockets of that coat of his.

Before he leaves, Enjolras manages to turn his neck far enough to catch him at the door and ask, “What is your name?”

And he looks at him, finally, as if he has been waiting for this. But his words come as if they are lofty tomes and he is blowing away the thick layer of dust that has gathered on their vellum pages. “Jean Valjean.”

“Do you know mine?”

“I do, Julien.”

“Enjolras.” Deeply inhaling, nearly filling his lungs, Enjolras tries to pull himself up and finds his body too limp and feeble to support itself on his elbows alone. He collapses back to the bed with a small shudder. “You will call me Enjolras.”

-

It is dark, and there are no lamps to light in Combeferre’s room.

He resided above a butcher’s shop near Jehan’s old place, where the air at times smelled sharply of offal and there were too many blankets on the bed and Jehan often woke with his face immersed in thick black hair and his smile pressed into the warmth of Combeferre’s neck. Before June, there had been lights. But he took them to the Musain in spring, when nights in the back room grew longer and eyes strained to scavenge arguments from newly written charters and the censored press that each man brought in by the handful. He no longer had time to stoop over his papers, his books, with his fingers ink stained and his brow wrinkled. Instead he raged, quietly--about theater, and bread, and universities, and the way his jaw tightened and his eyes danced and the veins in his neck pressed against his skin was so very beautiful.

The door is unlocked. Jehan lowers his eyes as he enters, raises them slowly as if there will still be a tall, thick-shouldered form at the open window, asking him if he observed how long the moon was in the wane. It has been a full day, losing himself in Paris backstreets where the holes in his shoes do not protect his feet from stagnant rain water and trying again and again to find the river and flinching at every brush of his shoulder. He wants Combeferre, even if he is not there.

But that is not it.

He sits at the old oak desk in the corner, and he needs nothing more than his friends. He had been so quiet in Marseille, except when he met Enjolras. He found odd places to sit in the marketplace, perched himself on the high windowsill in his bedroom, positioned himself atop rocky sea outcroppings, and read until a concerned civilian or two would drag him back home to his father, warning that his boy would find himself begging unless he stopped reading his funny little symbols--ancient Greek, he corrected--and learned to speak to the other boys his age. He wants the men he met in Paris back, and wanting them will do him no good.

Behind a stack of books, there is a strange glint of gold. To touch Combeferre’s possessions, though the man had once whispered softly into the dip of his shoulder that anything of his was Jehan’s if he pleased, feels pseudo-sacrilegious. That small part of Combeferre, the way he left his books, his sheets, his specimens, would be gone. Even the half empty cup of water on the edge of the desk is too much a part of him to dare profane. But Jehan is nothing if not a professed magpie.

He has never seen his likeness in paint, save for the large, gaudy portrait of his younger self in a green skeleton suit, looking positively severe and Napoleonic despite the redness of his cheeks and the billowy tufts of hair about his face. It graced the foyer of his parents’ home, and he was never overly satisfied with the permanence of its position.

The portrait before him is small enough to fit comfortably in the palm of his hand, but it has no need of grandeur. It is simple, clean, nothing he sat for, but drawn from memories of his face that must have run deep as riverbeds. This miniature Jehan stares off into an unknown distance, his eyes drooping and sunken in that sorrowful sort of manner no one has ever quite appreciated as much as he has, his hair sitting, artfully disheveled, on the shoulders of his blue coat. One slender, pale hand peeks into the bottom of the picture, fingers entwined with the stem of a cheerfully purple globe amaranth. And at the corner of his flushed lips is a soft smile, barely there until he holds it to the light.

It is connected to another portrait, of Combeferre, his skin as smooth and tan as leather, his dark hair falling in that single perfect wave across his high forehead, his spectacles glinting from the gentle curve of his nose. And, god, Jehan wishes he could remember him like that. Not the man who looked half torn apart by wild beasts as he fumbled for more bullets and tended the wounded with blood seeping from his own brow. Not the man who last touched his hand to give him his reloaded gun.

Jehan snaps the portrait frames together on a fragile hinge. He cannot soothe his feverish heart thrashing against his chest. There is no one to place their hand on the nape of his neck or their arms about his waist and ask him what’s the matter. There are no friends to sit him down with a full cup of wine and tell him all this moroseness and melancholia don’t suit him near as well as the laughter that bursts forth when Feuilly blows rings with his pipe smoke, or when Courfeyrac manages to tie the ends of Enjolras’s hair to the back of his chair before he leaps to his feet with revolutionary fervor.

He is lucky he knows where Combeferre stored his medicine.

The man never kept it for himself in particular. He tested it, often, muttering indignantly that if he were to someday use them on patients, he should know what he was administering--he did not like to see them suffer, and so he suffered himself.

_One dose too many and you’ll become a Romantic._

Jehan turns a glass bottle over in his hand and smiles. A Romantic, a silly notion. A touch fanciful and a touch morbid, too comfortable with the notion of either dying gloriously or draped over a bed of silk with an opium pipe in hand. But always for something. Always for someone.

He would have--could have. For France. For the future. For anything and everything Combeferre believed that future held. The future was an intangible thing to him, something to gaze upon with wonder as it rose about him, directionless, shifting as the world shifted. Combeferre saw infinities in that future.

One sip, a small one. Jehan stands and removes his coat and shoes before he submerging himself in the mounds of worn, moth-eaten blankets he had so often cocooned himself in. He thinks, for a moment, he feels the dense liquid hit the bottom of his stomach and he kneads the mattress with his free hand. The drowsiness creeps sluggishly, and he does not notice until his eyelids refuse to peel themselves back. It is pleasant, briefly. He digs his nose into the bed and the air is a heavy burden inside him.

A smaller drink, but another. This much will not kill him, he knows, and he is not grateful for it. But he needs another minute. Jehan breathes in more deeply, and it comes with even greater difficulty. One last instant of clarity, and he pushes himself up on his forearms. He can smell the heat, and the white of the moon over Paris aches in his skull. His heart thuds languidly, and Jehan curls in on himself. There are tears, hot against his skin and salty at the corners of his lips. He does not want moonlight without the men who stared up into it with him.

A taste on the tip of his tongue. It is bitter and wondrous and god, why is he taking it this slowly? There are sobs caught in his mouth, and even more caustic words behind his teeth. He is Atlas beneath the crushing weight of breath, and he is Atlas enduring. But he desires nothing more than the world to fall upon him, the oceans to come crashing in waves down his back, the mountains to crumble in the grooves of his spine. The portrait frame flickers golden on the desk so very, very far across the room, and Jehan screams into one last drink.

His bones shake as he collapses onto the floor, and there is a great loss of stirring within him. Jehan’s fingertips quiver as they scour his body for any last tremble of life, finding nothing but the faint beating of his heart like the slow tintinnabulation of the heaviest church bells.

This is nothing to die for.

He sputters for another mouthful of air. Jehan has always believed in a future, found religion in the unknown, searched for gods and discovered them in the far reaches before him. There are gods in trains, and in cameras, and in republics, and surely in Paris this day. He finds another breath’s worth of laughter, and the gods will not throw Patroclus from the walls of Troy tonight. He will rend the stone beneath his hands. He will fill the hollows of Achilles’ armor, he will look over the towers of Ilium, he will see them fall.

Jehan will not die because he has nothing to live for.

He will live until there is something more to die for.

The flat of his palm presses against his torso, and he mutters strings of words that may not be French at all. He has committed so terribly much to memory, a skald of the most ancient tongues to his ethereal raiders, a rhapsode shaking his staff at the damp, filthy air. And he will continue as long as his words.

He opens his lips. “ _Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, ché la diritta via era smarrita_...”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That's all for the Barricade Day spree, but not nearly for this work. Thank you to my editors, again.
> 
> For reference: the beautiful skeleton suit http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/6/62/Hulsenbeck-detail.jpg/150px-Hulsenbeck-detail.jpg
> 
>  
> 
> (By the way, Jehan's quote at the end is from Canto I of Dante's Inferno, and translates to, from the translation I could find online:
> 
> "Midway upon the journey of our life  
> I found myself within a forest dark,  
> For the straightforward pathway had been lost.")


	4. Chapter 4

Fleeing from the law does not grant one many opportunities for honest work, and the small pouch of money Jehan managed to scour from his now abandoned room will not last him long.  He has thrown a few other necessities into the monogrammed trunk his family sent him to Paris with, under the fading, but optimistic illusion he would find himself in law school.  Among them: five unidentified books he grabbed off his bed, two changes of his most drab clothing, one beautifully embroidered, practically threadbare red coat, all the poetry he could manage to line the bottom with, a comb, a straight razor, a notebook, and a hunting knife. The hunting knife is, in reality, no longer in the trunk. It is stuffed securely into the lining of his coat, should he find use for it. He presses his arm to his side, at times, if only to feel it against him.

The people here, wherever it is his feet have taken him, know little. They know of insurgencies, and of fallen barricades, and of sons who did not return last week, they ask if he has heard anything from his friends. Because he is young, and he must have known someone, certainly. A friend of a friend. A childhood acquaintance. A sibling.

“There were quite a few fellows from the university,” says a balding man with creases like wet paper at the corners of his eyes. “You look like a fine man, educated I’d guess, probably found a couple missing from the lecture hall. How old are you, anyway?”

It seldom occurs to Jehan that he is twenty two. He forgets to count his years sometimes, thinks of himself as merely existing as the world floats by. But he has spent about five years in Paris, on his own for the most part. Seventeen in Marseille, only four of them interrupted by the presence of a boy with garishly long hair and blue eyes that could kill a man, were more than enough to satisfy a lifetime’s worth of seaside mundanity. At eighteen, he followed that same boy to a shabby cafe, occasionally to a small bistro which shared a name with a city of Agamemnon. Nineteen and his heart belonged to a scientist, a philosopher, a man with skin like bronze and hair like China silk and a labyrinthine mind no Daedalus could have built.

Twenty. There was a year to reckon with. A year for kings, and for a group of friends who met for drinks and light political debates to metamorphosize entirely. Twenty one and twenty two are not separate entities in his mind. Somewhere between raising his voice to protest the need for innocent blood, laboring away at pamphlets, and finding time not to fall into the Seine, he grew a year older, and he became part of Paris.

He wets his lips and looks at his shoes. “Twenty two.”

“You seem so young.”

“I've been told.”

A hand brushes his arm, shoulder slowly down to elbow, and he can't help but snap his teeth and flinch back, his mouth twisted into a snarl. The man frowns, rolls his eyes over the rim of his cup before turning away. There has always been something irreparably feral to his nature. The Hound of Ulster, come to Paris.

This man is not the first. He is the third that evening, and Jehan is beginning to realize that he should not be here. In a less sober moment, he wonders if he could make money with all this attention. Certainly won't put him in any better graces with his family, but he's never had a problem with a bit of casual intimacy. But his teeth are still bared, and one wrong touch, he fears, may drive them into someone’s arm.

“I am young,” he spits, “not foolish. I am not to be played with. I have seen more in my days than you could while away your twilight years fathoming.”

The man's gaze strips him bare again. “A poet?”

“It has been my undoing. I could have been a lawyer.”

“You did attend university, then?"

“I thought to.” Jehan gnaws at the corner of his mouth. Why is he still here? What poignancy does this man, still fixed on the inside of the leg Jehan has perched up on the seat of his chair, have to offer him? “By all accounts, I had every right to wash up on the river banks like Shelley years ago. I find poets often don’t fancy living as much as I.”

There is no hand on him, but Jehan writhes beneath a few different glances in his direction.

“What do you fancy then?” asks a man who, not an hour ago, twirled his finger through a loose strand of Jehan’s hair.

He leans into the man, leans so close he must be able to smell the wine on Jehan’s breath and says, “For all these bastards who’ve been fantasizing about what’s between my legs to piss off and have a nice fuck elsewhere.”

The men about him laugh riotously. Jehan doesn’t know if what he’s feeling is pride or queasiness. A few make toasts with him, and he is more than comforted by the knife none of them have yet felt in his coat, but he feels ridiculous. He is not himself. He looks like one of them, in his dull green waistcoat, his torn black coat, his trousers that mold to the shape of his leg and hook beneath his heel. Jehan tugs at his cravat--burgundy, the only bit of his usual wardrobe he has allowed--and knows that it is better he become part of the background.

There were times he spoke to Enjolras, on the rocky seashore near their childhood homes, and furiously insisted that Jean Prouvaire would be someone. He would not go to school, make a living, and become another feast for the discerning Parisian worms. He would bring fire to mankind, and perhaps he would burn in it. And as he stood before the National Guard on the fifth of June, he did not think of immolation, but of his friends. Of the people who still needed him. Of living, for their sakes.

“What happened to your pretty face, boy?” one of the younger drunks coos.

Jehan touches the cut running along his hairline, the newfound crookedness of his nose. “A couple fights, nothing much.”  
“I think you’re lying,” the bald man teases. “You carry your life around in a trunk, it would be amiss of me to think you weren’t some variety of suspicious character.”

“The plight of poets. We’re all suspicious characters.” Jehan stands. “I would like to go home, and I would appreciate it if I was not followed.”

One of the men gestures to his trunk. “What home?”

“Somewhere that isn’t here.”

-

As what little illumination night brings fades into pre-dawn black, Jehan is reminded of two things: his arms are tired, and the robbers will be out soon. And for the second, he is glad.

He knows the man he is looking for, in a manner of speaking.  Mostly, he has caught him in the corner of his eye, too soon gone before he can turn and see him. But he has followed him here before, out of some sense of self-destructive curiosity.

“You’ll get yourself killed,” Combeferre had said, stroking his hair and never quite meaning it enough to stop him. He accompanied him, once, too distracted by the small cat that had decided to follow him to look out for any potential illegal enterprises.

Jehan is conscious of the fact that he would make for a damned awful criminal. Surely not an intimidating one. He is tall, very much so, but unbearably thin, so that the curves of his arm bones and the sharpness of his elbows and the knots of his kneecaps are clear beneath his skin. And he is often nervous. It takes little to drive him to shaking and stuttering and fidgeting with anything from his hair to the seams of his clothing to the lines of his palms to the strange little veins that run along the inside of his wrists. He often wondered, the closer the fifth of June drew, if he had the strength to kill a man. It does not make him any less anxious to know that he does.

He stops before an alley, which cuts jaggedly between a wine shop and a tailor’s storefront. Yes, he’s tracked him here before, certainly. Jehan remembers the distinct crispness of the air and the smell of liquor and the inexplicable uneasiness he felt standing here no more than a month ago. With a final self assurance that his knife is still there, Jehan sets down his trunk and sits on it.

It is thirty minutes before the empty backstreets produce a slender figure, cinched black coat falling at his knees and patchy top hat askew. He seems to melt from the gloom itself, slowly tearing his limbs from is as he emerges from a perpendicular alleyway and cleans his hands on the inside of his clothing.

Jehan doesn’t wait. He picks himself up and, before the shadow can dissolve again, calls, “Don’t think I don’t recognize you, Montparnasse.”

A face gleams white in the dwindling starlight, and a pair of carmine lips pull tight across savage teeth. “You haven’t found your Elysium, Prouvaire?”

“Perhaps you have returned from helping some poor soul to it yourself.” Jehan tenses as the other man approaches. This is not a good idea, despite all attempts at rationalization. But he finds himself rather fascinated with the sound of his own name in Montparnasse’s mouth. That he knows it, mostly.

“You aren’t at any liberty to say such things, are you? Not after your revolution. No, your friends have had their hands in guiding souls there themselves, haven’t they? Pity they’re all--”

“I’m not here to discuss my friends.” Jehan senses the heat climbing up his neck and, god, don’t let him break now. He has his fish in the net, he cannot let it slip through the holes. “I’ve come to...”

“You killed her, you know.” Montparnasse rests his foot on Jehan’s luggage. “Not you, personally. But your uprising--I can blame that.”

Jehan finds his throat too tight to speak. He has vague memories, of a girl who must have followed Marius, a girl who died with a bullet through her chest and who should not have been there and who is twisting Montparnasse’s mouth into a shape more suited to a wolf than a man even in death. He cannot conjure her name, though, and it eats at him. Jehan knows the hole in this assassin’s heart. He has been drawn up into it himself, curled there foolishly for days. He knows what it is to leave a piece of oneself behind that barricade.

“I don’t know,” Jehan begins, “if my offer will repay any of this.”

Montparnasse’s hand is at the knot of his cravat. A single eyebrow raises in place of a question.

“There is no work for me, nothing decent. I'll be arrested if they ask my name, you understand.” Jehan clears his throat, halfway choked by the pressure of Montparnasse’s python grip. “I’ve come to inquire about your business. You’re an assassin, I know, you haven't fooled me. And I know how to kill.”

“You haven't the heart,” Montparnasse muses. “The hand, the stomach, but never the heart.”

“You don't know me.”

“I know your kind.” He releases the fabric twisted in his fingers. “Impressive, that you have the gall to speak to me. You are either brave or mad or some odd concoction of the two.”

Jehan adjusts his cravat. “I didn’t kill her. It isn’t my place to refuse your anger, no. But I understand. I understand in ways you cannot _imagine_ , and I will not be spoken to as if--”

There is a cold, thin edge pressed to the underside of his jaw, and Jehan lets out a quiet prayer to whatever god may listen.

“You have been dead,” Montparnasse says. “You have been dead since the fifth, and awaiting burial. Perhaps it would be one last kindness for me to lay you to rest.”

Jehan tries not to breathe into the blade in Montparnasse’s hand. He is a fool, he is reckless, he should never have--

Jehan reaches into his coat and prods the tip of his knife into Montparnasse’s stomach. “Don’t trust a man with nothing left to go silently.”

He adjusts his hold on the knife handle and stares onto a pair of dark eyes, still fixed on the line of his jaw.

“Drop the knife, Montparnasse.”

The voice is not his. It is low, and smooth, and Jehan feels his pulse drop at the sound. He closes his eyes, does not lower his own weapon for one instant.

“Gods above, don’t sic yourself on the poor man, you’re not doing your ilk any favors.”

The clack-clacking of a cane on paving stones grows louder.

“You hear me, you bastard, put the...”

The noise stops, and Jehan hears nothing so loudly as his own pulse in his ears.

Montparnasse leans back. “The Guard did a piss-poor job cleaning up. Left half your lot alive, took a girl who wasn’t involved. I ought to deal with the leftovers.”

A rough hand wrenches Jehan’s knife from his hand, and he lets out a small yelp. “Open your eyes, Jean.”

Before him is a ghost, a revenant, the dark specter of a man that was once perhaps the stout, unshaven drunk who slurred Latin to him and brought him to one or two ill-fated savate lessons in disreputable warehouses on the riverbank and laughed despite the world. The hunting knife that Jehan once held is in his hand, firmly at Montparnasse’s collar bone.

“Go,” Grantaire says.

Jehan shakes his head.

“Don’t try to talk sense to him,” Montparnasse says. “The boy’s daft. Came here asking for work--”

“I suggest you leave as well.” Montparnasse raises his hand to strike, but Grantaire seizes his wrist and touches the flat of Jehan's knife to it. “Ah, Scaevola, don’t hold your hand to the fire yet. You are not here as an enemy to kill your enemy.”

Jehan nearly misses the flash of movement that follows. It is a sudden gunshot of motion, a deft sweep of the feet and strike of the cane and the assassin is writhing on the stones beneath him. He attempts to rise and is greeted by knees on his chest, his own knife now at his throat.

“Go back to your fucking rat hole,” Grantaire hisses, and his voice is straining, and his other hand has dropped Jehan's knife and is clutching his side. “And don't you dare think about laying one finger on him.”

Montparnasse breathes heavily for a moment against the Grantaire’s weight on his chest.  

“Say something.”

“I’ll go.”

Montparnasse scrambles to his feet the second he is released, replacing his fallen hat.

“Make yourself a living.” Grantaire hands him his knife, which he takes back like a child offered his favorite doll. “But not here.”

The two men watch as Montparnasse retreats, wordlessly, into the dark once more. He is gone just as he appeared, absorbed into the dusk that birthed him, save for a final flash of silver. Jehan sinks to his trunk once more, his legs trembling, his hand picking anxiously through his hair, before he finds the strength to mutter,

“You’re alive. My god, you’re--”

A pair of thick arms pull him to his feet, hold him close, and god, he could not be happier to feel someone warm and steady against him.  He rests his cheek against the top of Grantaire’s head, allows himself at last to weep, to sob until his throat is sore and his eyes burn.

“My god,” he repeats. “Don’t leave me. You’re real, you have to be real, please, god...”

Grantaire shushes him gently, muffled by the fabric of his disheveled cravat. “I’m here.”

Jehan’s legs are going to fall out from under him, but he can’t let go. He takes a handful of Grantaire’s dense curls, pulls him closer by his waist until his fingers come away damp.

Jehan steps back. “You’re bleeding.”

The left side of Grantaire’s sullied, cream colored waistcoat is glimmering dark red. He touches it, flinches, and throws on the coat Jehan hadn't noticed him discard.

“Shit.”

“Are you alright?”

“I’m not dead.” Grantaire glances up from his wound, and his mouth tilts into a smile. “And neither are you.”

-

By some means of sorcery, foul play, or charm, Grantaire has rented a room. It is smaller than Jehan’s, with space only for a bed and a chair and a wood stove for the winter, if he owned one. His window faces out to an alley and the back of another building, and Jehan must lean out until his feet are nearly off the ground to see a sliver of sky.

Grantaire sits and strips his shirt and waistcoat in one adroit movement, then unwraps a layer of bandages around his midsection. His left side, between his breast and the curve of his stomach, is marred by a large gash, which has barely begun to heal in places and reopened in others.

“There are more bandages over there.” He points to a leather bag slouched in the corner. “I’ve been shot, before you ask, in a better place than most.”

“I should say.” Jehan kneels and digs for bandages amongst the other contents of the bag. It is not nearly as complete a set as the trunk he has lived from, only containing a spare waistcoat and shirt, a small cloth sack of coins, and innumerable lint bandages. He begins the delicate process of unraveling a tangle of them. “Thank you. I don’t think I could have fought him off.”

“Montparnasse? He’s less than he seems. You have a way, my little poet, of being fantastically wild when you want to. You could have had him.”

He hadn’t realized how much he missed Grantaire’s lovingly mocking nattering. The man had always spoken to him as an equal, despite his youth, his quietness, his odd habits.

Jehan winds a length of bandage about his hand as he works. “I think you have more of the lion in you than I.”

“One needn’t be a lion,” Grantaire says.

Jehan finishes unknotting a suitable length and slides it off his hand, a reluctant grin aching at the corners of his lips. The bleeding is not as heavy now. Grantaire keeps his hand over it, and Jehan watches him control his breaths as if to soothe the pain. He perches himself in the chair across from Grantaire, legs doubled and eyes peering over the tops of his kneecaps as his new companion redresses his wound.  “I am grateful for you, though; grateful I am no longer alone. I detest it, despite my own nature--I am melancholy, I am fretful, and yet...” He places his chin atop his knees. “...I find myself in need of human company.”

“You were always strange.” Grantaire ties off the end of his bandages. “Odd you and I survived, out of anyone. Two libertines: a drunk and a poet.”

“You are more than a drunk,” Jehan says, and his eyes drift halfway shut.

“I could have been.”

Jehan blinks lazily. “I haven’t published a thing. I exist on a small stipend from my family, which I will shortly no longer receive. I have studied under no one. You have at least done that.”

The room is silent for a moment.

“We are one of two things.” Jehan sighs. “An artist and a poet, or a drunk and an opium-eater, and we are nothing in between.”

“They could have spared better than me.”

The quiet comes again, swiftly and suddenly, and Jehan feels it as if a chill through his bones.

“There were doctors, lawyers in those men,” Grantaire continues. “They could have made something of themselves, at least known how to. And believe me Jean, I know Paris, but I’m not sure what good I'll be for anything but finding out bistros and wine shops and those seamstress' shops pretty young things gather near. I studied art, for what? I have no job. I copy the masters, I paint miniatures and lovers' eyes. There will be no work for me now.

“You and I, Jean, what are we? There is little in this world for cyprians. We cannot feast on love and liberty. We have heads for Aphrodite, not Athena, and perhaps souls for Hades.”

“Grantaire--”

“Don't delude yourself. Jean Prouvaire is as much a specter in this world as I. We are transitory, we are fleeting, we are not made for this earth. We are flowers that grow by the footpaths, and we are destined to be replaced. Men like...men like Combeferre, perhaps. There are the trees. There are men who could have lasted, even in the shade.”

Jehan feels something hot and angry rising in his eyes. “Please, I--”

“You, Jean-- _you_ are a flower perhaps. You have always been so tragically, wiltingly beautiful. I, my friend, am ivy. I strangle trees and flowers in their youth. I fail even at dying.”

“Stop!” Jehan shudders and grips the seat of his chair, planting his bare feet firmly on the floor.

Grantaire sighs. He touches his side, suddenly tender, drawing a light spot of blood with his fingertips.

“We are alive,” Jehan says. “That’s what we have, more than any of them.”

“You are alive, my friend. Maybe that’s all you need.”

Jehan curls up on his chair once more, wipes his eyes. “I think I will never comprehend what you so detest about surviving.”

“It is the one thing I was determined not to do.”

He realizes he knows nothing. Save for Bahorel, he has no idea concerning the final fates of his friends. He saw them all, lying there in their last repose, out of context and out of meaning.

“You disappeared.” Jehan tucks a strand of hair back. “I saw you go to find a table, and I...I never saw you again. What happened?”

Grantaire looks at him, and he wears the same expression as the last moment Jehan saw him, his eyes drooping and his lower lip hanging. “I slept. I slept through the guns and the cannon fire and...everything. I drank, and I told myself I wouldn’t wake up for his goddamn revolution if he didn’t want me there. He didn’t need me--no one needed me. But I stayed. God. What a fucking waste. I could have gone home, he could have just died thinking nothing worse, nothing better of me.

“But I awoke, somehow. I saw their backs to me, as if they had simply thought be a corpse and passed me by, and by some providence, there he was. I may not have believed in his revolution, but there was a man there, and his face was bloody and his hair was aflame in that sunlight and that--that, my dear friend--was something to believe in. And he was alone. Looking down musket barrels and so terribly, terribly alone.

“I couldn’t let him go, you understand. Not this man, not the last thing I--...” His voice breaks, and Jehan lowers his feet to the ground once more. “I asked his permission, to die for him, by his side, and I felt his hand limp in mine, and he did not go peacefully. I know that much.

“There was blood when I woke again. It was night, and there was blood, everywhere, in place of him. They had left me. Taken the bodies all and left me. The man had chosen me, believed that there was perhaps something meaningful to me, enough to let me die with him, and I could not even grant him that.”

Jehan does not remember rising, but he is on the bed, and Grantaire flinches away from his hand as he reaches to place it on his shoulder.

“This isn’t the place for poetic sympathy,” Grantaire says.

“At least you were with him.” Jehan clenches the sheets in his fist and, god, he is a fool. His arms tremble. “Please, forgive me, I--”

“Who was he?”

His hand reaches into the pocket of his coat, touches shattered glass and contorted metal, and his face is damp when Grantaire reaches up to dry it. For once, he exposes his relic to the light. A pair of spectacles, still rusty with blood at the corners, crushed and bent, but still his. “Combeferre.”

There are no more words between them. Grantaire lays back on the mattress, quietly pulling Jehan down to rest against his shoulder, winding his wild, unwashed hair through his fingers.

“Don’t leave.” Jehan closes his eyes. The scant moonlight still shines blue through his eyelids. “I’m afraid I can’t be alone much longer.”

Grantaire exhales deeply. “Then I will not.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First all Jehan chapter, hopefully successful. Thank you to godbewithyouihavedone for the beta and the screaming about her feelings. And thank you to those of you who have stuck with these first chapters.
> 
> Jehan's 'Hound of Ulster' name-drop refers to Cu Chulainn, the hero of the Tain Bo Cuailnge in Irish mythology, who was known for his riastrad, or his ability to contort into a terrifying, merciless monster in battle.
> 
> Grantaire indirectly quotes Roman assassin Gaius Mucius Scaevola, who, when he went to assassinate the Etruscan king Porsena and murdered his scribe instead, famously told the king "I am Gaius Mucius, a citizen of Rome. I came here as an enemy to kill my enemy, and I am as ready to die as I am to kill. We Romans act bravely and, when adversity strikes, we suffer bravely." To prove his determination to the cause over his own self preservation, he held his right hand over an open fire without showing signs of pain, and earning his family the immortal nickname Scaevola, or 'left-handed'.


	5. Chapter 5

Enjolras has watched the sun rise and set over the ceiling far too often. The doses of laudanum decrease, slowly, and he remembers the first week of June too well. He sees the dim yellow lamplight on the sullen faces of underslept men.

Of his friends.

He reminds himself of this, constantly. This was not a random assortment of revolutionaries, of like-minded men who met by happenstance one summer morning. He had known them, cared for them, laughed with them, loved them, led them into a battle only he had come out of. They deserved better.

The nights here are not silent. There is the rustling of rose bushes and the chirping of nocturnal creatures and the creaking of this infernal old house, and Enjolras beats his fist against the bed in place of screaming. The medicine does not take the noise away--it cannot. And so he bites down on his lip, squeezes his eyes shut, and whittles away at another sleepless night.

Jean Valjean enters his room as the night turns gray before the dawn. He is unshaven, fully dressed but shoeless, toting his usual corked amber bottle. His face is deep and haggard in the light through the curtains, and he would be terrifying if not for the calm that touches upon his features.

“You are in pain,” he says. There is no questioning in his voice.

Enjolras does nothing but look up at him, his eyes wide.

Valjean sits beside him. “Anything I can do to help you, don’t hesitate to ask me.”

“I don’t...”

A bird chirps outside the window, and Enjolras inhales sharply.

Valjean lays a cool hand on Enjolras's head and lets his fingers sink softly into his hair. “This shall pass. This all shall pass.”

Enjolras does not resist the bottle at his lips. It cannot stop the sound, no. But there is a serenity the laudanum brings that he for once allows himself to give into.

Valjean’s hand rests now on his shoulder. “Do not feel as if you are a stranger here. This is your home, should you accept it. I assure you that you will want for nothing as long as you are in my--”

“Why?” His eyes flicker back and forth across the old man’s face. How long has he been here? His hair feels unwashed, his appetite gone but somehow unsatisfied, his body too fatigued and aching to move. “You have no reason. You’ve never known me. I am nothing to you, I--”

“No one is nothing to me.”

Enjolras sucks in his lower lip and sighs. “Thank you, I suppose, monsieur.”

The birds continue to chatter, but he does not find it nearly as grating on his ears. He absently strokes the sheets beneath his fingers, traces patterns in the water damage cracks in the ceiling with his eyes as he has done for days. He has no better stimulation. The girl handed him Voltaire once, and he skimmed and re-skimmed the same paragraph until the machinations of his mind whirred stutteringly to a halt and he slept with the book open on his chest the rest of the afternoon.

“I would like to leave here,” he says.

Valjean’s brows crease. “This house?”  
“This room. There is a garden, beneath the window, and I’ve been here for...”

“More than a week. Just barely.”

The time seems too short. He lays his palm on his stomach, flinches when he draws blood. Valjean grabs his wrist a bit too gruffly and lays his arm down at his side.

There are shades of orange and purple to the dawn now. Not in such away that they muddle into a dull, ugly brown--playing like cathedral glass against the whitewashed walls and his bare, pale skin. The air is dense with dew, and Enjolras feels it stick in his throat.

“I would like to leave,” he repeats with as much more force as he can muster.

Valjean’s hand finds his, and he squeezes it back familiarly, his own only large enough to grasp the fleshy part of this thumb. The man’s other hand finds its way to his coat pocket, and he removes it balled into a fist, almost trembling as he gazes down at it. Slowly, he peels his fingers back.

The object in his hand is small, crumpled, glimmers dimly in the sun. Enjolras takes it and turns it over between his fingers.

“A bullet casing,” he says, tracing the grooves near the base with his nail. He knows these. the sorts of bullets he loaded his carbine with the night of June fourth. It still hangs dearly onto the heat of Valjean’s hand.

“The physician removed it from your spine.”

Enjolras remembers, with a distant haziness, the shots twisting his body like an empty sack. He remembers being pinned against the back wall for only a minute or so before the sheer pressure of his weight against it was no longer enough and his knees gave beneath him. He remembers a pain that he could not place.

“I give thanks it didn’t kill you,” Valjean continues. “Daily, I give thanks. But it has still pierced your spine, it has still...”

Enjolras clenches the casing in his palm, and his pulse is beating hard against it.

“You will not walk again.”

There is no gentleness to those words. No matter how much the old man puts into them, there cannot be, and there will not be, and he cannot force there to be. The bullet shell digs into the heel of Enjolras’s hand. He concentrates on the breath cycling through his lungs, squints at the rise in the sheets where his feet lie. Enjolras knows he is willing them--begging them--to move, and his heart is still racing.

He thinks of the joints in his ankles. The ligaments of his calves. The bend in his knee. The muscles in his thighs. And every part of him is shaking but his legs. He takes a deep, shuddering gasp, watches as they remain still and dead beneath the bedding.

Valjean touches his shoulder again. “Do not--”

Enjolras smacks his hand away far more loudly than he expects, and his own is red and stinging after. An unintelligible noise lurches out of his mouth. He bites his tongue to keep it back, but there are tears rising in his eyes and god, he shouldn’t have hit that hard. He isn’t a child.

“I thought,” Valjean begins, “it would be a good day to get you out of bed.”

Enjolras can do nothing but swallow another scream and soothe his aching hand.

“I’ve washed my daughter’s hair enough to know my way about it. Perhaps we might try to clean the blood out somewhat.”

He supposes he has no choice. The man can simply take him from his bed and carry him away when he wishes, and he will have nothing to do but perhaps shout unintelligibly and beat at him like a petulant boy. He will not stoop to that. And so he nods, and Valjean’s arms sweep him up as if he were no more substantial than vapor.

Enjolras watches his feet dangle, his ankles sway helplessly as Valjean pushes the door open with the side of his massive arm and carries him into the corridor. The walls here are blue, just a shade dimmer than the sky that peers through the rooftops of Paris’s streets, swaying with the shadows of trees branches that veil the windows, unadorned. His shoulder aches. His stomach is tight. But Enjolras watches the dancing silhouettes on the walls and not the swinging of his legs as Valjean descends the stairs.

There is a parlor, unfurnished but for a wooden stool, two simple couches, and a table between them. A porcelain basin sits, full with water and brimming with its own steam, in the center of the table. He eyes the cobalt designs that play across its surface--delicate vines and blossoms, tangled about themselves and sprawling across its pale curvature.

Valjean sets him on the furthest couch, placing a cushion between his neck and the polished wooden arm of the couch. “Lift your head.”

Enjolras tilts his chin towards his collar and lets his hair spill over the armrest.

-

“Why you keep it like this is beyond my comprehension.” Courfeyrac sighed flourishingly, knotted up his hands in Enjolras’s hair. “I don’t suppose I can even find where you’ve been struck.”

His fingers tugged at a tangle of curls, and Enjolras’s entire body seized. “There. God’s sakes, don’t pull it out.”

With a satisfied ‘hmph’, Courfeyrac stood. The table he dragged made a terrifying screech against the woodgrain, and Enjolras could almost hear the splinters curling up beneath it.

“It’s a wonder, really.” His fingers began to work at the length of black ribbon that still held back a few stray curls. “I swear to you, Enjolras, my friend, I’ve seen English dames with shorter hair yet. Steady now.”

A sudden coldness pricked Enjolras’s scalp. There it was, distinctly, the gash that had soaked his head crimson and put flickering colors behind his eyelids, ungracefully carved by an officer’s ring. But the water in the basin behind his head began to soothe where it once stung, becoming entwined in locks of his hair as it weighed them down. He breathed easy as Courfeyrac grasped two fistfuls, dutifully kneading it free of the blood that dried it into tight knots.

“Were you any other man,” Courfeyrac said, “I’d have left on that street to ruin all your pretty hair."

"You wouldn't have."

Courfeyrac's hands wound around another clump of hair and ceased their work. His body shivered with a nervous laugh. "No. No, I wouldn't."

-

There is still a pain in Grantaire’s side when he wakes, peels his eyes open to the thick haze of early morning and still hopes for a blessed second that they will close again. He flexes his somewhat numbed arm, finds there is a foreign sensation of weight holding it down and cutting off his circulation. A tuft of hair brushes against his cheekbone, and his hand strokes bone jutting sharply beneath delicate skin, and he remembers that not long ago he had thought the pulse that now drums lazily against him had stopped. He thinks it has only been five hours, at most, that he has tried to convince himself of the simple fact that Jean Prouvaire is alive.

“Move,” he groans. It sounds too much like a command. And so he repeats himself, softly, until his half conscious companion rolls off his arm and curls into a mound of threadbare blankets.

He props himself up on his elbows. “Jehan?” The nickname has always felt awkward, anachronistic, but when the man responds to it, he can think of nothing better.

“I didn’t sleep,” Jehan says. As if he has forgotten himself, he massages his temples and forces a quiet, “Good morning.”

Grantaire cannot help an unconscious grin. He’d forgotten the nights Jehan spent in his rooms years ago, the man’s restless turning or refusal to stay in bed, the faint scratching of his pen on nights he could do nothing but bleed out streams of thought.

He shrugs Jehan lightly off the slack of his shirt sleeves and forces himself to rise.

Shot, less than a week ago, left side of his abdomen. Enough to make the world go dark, but not to kill him, It still seeps, but he cannot prevent it. No matter--there is little enough.

“I’m glad you’re here.”

His head snaps towards the sound of Jehan’s voice. The man sits up against the wall, his clothes disheveled and his eyes drooping wearily. At times, Grantaire pities himself, for everything he has lost, for a sense of futility and pain and grief he could not imagine any man had felt. It is no more of a comfort to know Jehan has felt it as well.

Grantaire slips his shirt over his head and checks his side. From the look on Jehan’s face, it’s a good time to redo his bandages.

“I didn’t sleep,” Jehan continues as if he had never finished his earlier thought, “because I was...thinking. About what we should do.”

Grantaire stops unraveling his dressings. “Do about what?”

“About this. We’re unemployed, as good as homeless within the next month or so, and I am not certain how much mercy Paris has to spare us.” He kicks his spindly legs over the side of the bed. “I asked a medic once. They presume you dead and myself to be a runaway. The situation is entirely dreadful for two men who wish to experience continuous existence.”

In the ochre haze of morning, Grantaire observes his companion--the thick block of red that frames his face, the dreary green of his eyes, the almost crane-like structure of his bones. It feels as if he has been gone long enough to forget him. But then, no one forgets Jehan. Grantaire believes that, among few things, is a certainty .

“We’ll make money,” he says tersely.

“Money, yes. But how do you plan on going about that exactly?”

Grantaire surveys the room. “I’ll sell things. I don’t need a bed, maybe you don’t need all those damn books you’re hauling. It’ll be less for us to carry.”

There is a certain hurt look on Jehan’s face when he mentions the books. It’s a touchy subject, but he has seen the gold-leafed edges of those pages, the antique leather bindings. One would feed them for a good amount of time--how long he isn’t certain, but however long their stomachs are not empty and their backs are clothed, they will subsist.

“They are what I have.”

The phrase is hardly audible, but Grantaire does not ask him to repeat himself. After he finishes wrapping and redressing himself, he takes a tentative step towards the unwieldy leather trunk Jehan has dragged along with him. A wordless gesture towards it, which Jehan nods to, and he is on his knees unbuckling the fraying straps.

There is the ever present Aeschylus, crumbling at the corners, repaired once or twice at the taught stitches that hold it together. It is thrown hastily atop an ancient edition of Chernier that Jehan has marked his placed in with a scrap of thick parchment, painted by an all too familiar hand. An Aeneid is buried beneath his shirts,, and something Grantaire cannot decipher that appears to be in Hebrew. Placed more reverently than the rest, swaddled like a child in the remainder of Jehan’s clothing, is Dante’s _Inferno_ \--the rest of the epic comedy has disappeared, but this remaining third is better kept than the attire that protects it. The final book is a notebook, scrawled in Jehan’s own thin, looping, illegible script.

“I don’t think I could sell them,” Jehan says.

Grantaire turns the copy of Aeschylus over and over in his hands, weighing it on his palm. “I know.”

He rented this room with a painting. He’d been fond of it in years past--a study of St. Luke, patron of artists and physicians, modeled by their very own Joly in less clothing and more drapery than he would have liked. Grantaire recalled the summer’s day he threw several bedsheets over Joly’s shoulders and set him up at a table, as if Luke himself were in the process of painting the first icon of the holy virgin, looking up wistfully over his shoulder towards heaven for inspiration.

He recalls the blackish curls of Joly’s hair glinting in the early dawn--Joly had complained about the time, but the prospect of being rewarded in bottles of wine later was enough to keep him still. There were shades of sunrise Grantaire painted as they settled on the deep brown of Joly’s face, frantic energy in the whites of his eye, movement he had placed in the still fabric he had wrapped about him in a perhaps inappropriately classical fashion. But there were things he had not captured as well. The moments Joly had shaken his concentration with a small burst of laughter or facts from the textbook open in his lap beneath the table. The hour he had allowed Bossuet in to watch and he had stood over Grantaire’s shoulder and puffed out his cheeks until Joly smiled.

It was the last he had of Joly before he sold it. An old teacher of his was willing to pay--not handsomely, but enough. Said it could cause a scandal in the real market, but he appreciated the time his former pupil had put into it. Pity was still money. He had perhaps cared less then that it was gone. There was not much to live for anyhow, what did one painting of a man now dead to the world mean to him? Staring down at Jehan’s small pile of books now, it meant more than the roof it put over him.

“I’ll sell things,” Jehan says.

Grantaire clutches the book’s spine. “No, you...you don’t have to. I’ll find some money somehow, trust me.”

“I do trust you.”

He does not know whether the weight those words hit him with is joy or guilt. For an instant, he takes Jehan’s hand, and it is always less dainty than he thinks it will be. Maybe he hasn’t died for anything he thought he would, no, but he will get by. Some hope yet has been dragged from the wreckage.

“I’ll meet you at the cafe.” Jehan lets go and drops his gaze. “The one near here. This evening. Perhaps by then we will have scoured  all we can for money.”

Grantaire watches him pick at the edge of his shirt. “You have this funny sort of look about you when your mind is working at something. As if you are gnawing your ideas to the marrow.”

He waits for that singular flash of recognition in Jehan’s eyes, which comes late, but comes nevertheless. “Perhaps one must savor the marrow when the meat has gone.”

-

Grantaire should not be sent to find money. He knows this, and he knows it more with every hour he wastes away leering at the women passing by and staring down at the green glass bottle he spent his last pocket change on. It is a fleeting escape, but for some blessed second, he allows himself to forget that he cannot afford to be doing this.

He sells the small painting he hid away under his bed from thieves. His friends were often his best and most available models, and so Bahorel as Heracles is enough to buy food should they choose to spend the money on such, and he must be satisfied with his friends becoming his best source of income.

“You could come back,” his buyer says. His former teacher again. He is the only buyer Grantaire has now. “You are not for the art dealers of Europe yet. The schism of Gros and David has bred hatefully, and you are its bastard son. I would have thought the former would have tamed you. Another year perhaps and you might find your balance again.”

Grantaire clenches his fists at the thought, but perhaps the man is right. Too composed and classical to call himself a true pupil of Gros, too wild to claim the legacy of David. He used to restrain himself when he still painted lockets and lovers’ eyes and small portraits for commissions. But his personal paintings have never found a school to call their own,

“Your lion skins were imagined, I suppose.” The man inspects his painting, his gaze tracing up and down the curve of Heracles’ leg and the far too voguish cut of his hair. “But you managed a splendid stand-in for the man himself. I’m surprised you got him naked without pay.”

Grantaire smiles when he remembers Bahorel pointedly dropping his trousers in the middle of his apartment and insisting that he was all too keen to try out a bit of heroic nudity. He still has memories. Those are good for something.

The sun has begun to set. He looks through the window over the man’s shoulder and watches the shades of sunset return again. “I have to meet someone.”

“Another model of yours?”

“He has been.”

“I wish you luck with him. May he bring you a touch of artistic aim.”

Grantaire finds a small silk pouch of money being shoved into his hand before a doorman escorts him from the premises. There are still hours left before the evening. He will forget himself once more.

-

Certainly, night has fallen far past the point Jehan meant for them to meet at when he arrives at the cafe. But Jehan is still there, quietly positioned in the corner of the room. His stack of books is still present--his hair is not.

Rather, it has been cut to what most would deem an appropriate length, swept to one side and now displaying the slim sideburns that had been the only fashionable thing about him.

Grantaire sits, and Jehan places six francs between them.

“They liked the color,” he says. “It could have brought me far less if they didn’t like the color. The women that sell their hair there usually have more, but they don’t have much red. It’ll make a few dolls nice curls.”

“You took six for it?”

“I didn’t want to debate.” He taps his fingers rapidly on the edge of his books. “I was going to. Sell them, I mean. But there was some terrible pain in my chest, and I had heard of people selling their hair for a good sum, and I knew it wasn’t much but...it will grow back. My books will not.”

Grantaire does not argue. This is no time for that. Instead, he lets the small purse of coins from his coat pocket drop to the middle of the table.

“We’ll feast like kings,” he says.

The smile he prompts is maybe the first genuine, warm thing he has witnessed in days. He reaches over the table and ruffles the shorn hair at the back of Jehan’s head. God, how he missed laughter.

Grantaire does not know what it is about Jehan’s words last night that strikes him now, with a few swigs of wine on his brain and a few coins in his hand. They are alive. Perhaps that is enough for his companion, but it must be enough for him as well. There was little to live for before this. The niche he had found in Paris was uprooted, the only friends he had known with it. But there is this--there is Jean Prouvaire, with his funny crooked smile and his moony eyes and his soft voice and his skin freckled as if each of his little witticisms have collected themselves in marks across his body. There is something left.

It is not Enjolras, not the ideas he had stood for so obstinately, that Grantaire could never quite force himself to take with an amount of seriousness, but had found some strange way to admire nonetheless. Those are gone and dead and so is the man who gave them being. Jehan is not fire, passion, violence--crisp, sharp and sparingly given words and that sort of angelic beauty reserved for the rings of flame and wide, unblinking eyes that mortal men must be warned not to fear.

If Jehan is an opium-eater, then Grantaire is a drunk. But he is more than that. And perhaps by the strict, unbendable logic Grantaire once applied to undercut Enjolras’s ideals, he is more himself. He will strive to believe that someday.

“I once aspired to more,” Jehan muses, “than six francs out of life.”

Grantaire spins one coin lazily across the table towards him. “And what was that?”

“To be well dressed and be in love.”

It is as if Jehan expects him to recognize these words. When they spark no memory, the flickering smile at the corners of his mouth dims. Grantaire flicks another coin at him, which he catches just before it slides off the edge.

“You have accomplished one,” he says, “That is more than most.”

Jehan’s fingers tighten around the franc.

“I’m sorry.”

Jehan shakes his head, and Grantaire is unaccustomed to the lack of hair to shake with it. “I’m not.”

Another franc. This one falls to the floor. They both allow it to roll, as if it is not essential to their existence here. It is picked up as if it isn’t, by a man who furrows his brow at Grantaire and scoffs as he lifts it from the ground.

Grantaire once found himself at a similar position. He had taken Feuilly for a drink once--the idea of which had been somewhat of a waste, as Feuilly had not a drop of alcohol. Not that Grantaire hadn’t offered to pay. Repeatedly. But the man sat there with that concentration heavy on his brow as ever, smiling peacefully as he discussed the people he had stopped to talk to that day and twirling a small coin between his fingers. Grantaire raised an eyebrow when Feuilly let it fall, but Feuilly continued the conversation--his voice was always so gentle, Grantaire remembers that much about him even when he tries to forget.

When an old man leaned to pick it up, Feuilly had smiled with just a momentary lightness in his eyes that Grantaire still cannot shake for the life of him.

“You’re just going to let it go?” he asked.

Feuilly shrugged. “Maybe he needed that today. I’ve paid off what I’ve got to pay off, let him at it.”

Grantaire is not Feuilly, and this man is not a tottering beggar who looks at him like Christ. The coin he dropped may have been a third of what Feuilly earned a day and still thought to give, but this is no mood to cross him in.

“Oy, you!” He stands up, and Jehan’s hand moves momentarily to stop him, but flinches back.

The man before him is taller than even himself, just so that his chin rests at Grantaire’s eye level. The smell of booze is woven into the fabric of his shirt sleeves, which are rolled up above his elbows to reveal tense, sinewy forearms. It’s been too long since Grantaire fought. He’d been able to fell Montparnasse, but the boy was a slip of a thing. The tear in his side is begging him not to rediscover his savate skills.

“If it means so much to you...” The man steps closer, and the tip of Grantaire’s crooked nose is almost pressed to the buttons of his waistcoat. “...your friend shouldn’t have missed it.”

“Don’t talk about him. This is between us. Now you hand me the fucking franc back and I go about my business quietly.”

A large hand shoves him back. “Then go about it as loudly as you want.”

Grantaire lunges, but another hand pushes him away, a familiar hand, and Jean Prouvaire has straightened to his full height before him. He meets the gaze of their assailant, keeps his feet planted as the man approaches until their breaths must be mingling.

“I do not believe you know what you do,” Jehan says. “Perhaps you would have ceased sooner.”

The man spits at the ground between them.

Jehan crosses his arms.“I sold my hair for that franc, I’ll have you know, monsieur.”

“Like a fucking whore.” The man pushes his chest out until it almost touches Jehan’s. “Are you a whore, boy? Would you get me off for that franc back? You--”

Jehan had looked surprised when Grantaire told him he could have beaten Montparnasse before he stepped in. Perhaps he had simply not been in the mood that day. Grantaire recognizes the knife that he took from him last night, that is now at the side of the other man’s neck.

“I used to want to be a knife thrower.” Jehan is now the first to creep closer. The man does not seem to notice where he is leading him until his back presses to the wall. “Do not doubt I know my way with this one here. One franc if you stand still and I throw this into the wall beside your head.”

“So what? I give you a franc or I get a knife in my skull?”

Jehan digs the tip of the knife into the wood. “I have confidence in my skill. I do not wish to harm you. I wish to harm no man if I can avoid it.”

Grantaire sees the slight tremble in Jehan’s hands before they steady once more. He means what he says. He would not hurt this man if he could spare him that trouble.

And now, he must. The man finds just enough room to swing his arm back and hit Jehan’s jaw with an unpleasant grunt. Grantaire catches Jehan before his awkward center of balance sends him off his feet, steps around him to throw his weight into the man and topple them both into the chairs at the next table. His side is splitting, and he bites back a scream to bloody his fist on the man’s mouth. But the moment he is pushed back, he cannot rise. The ache pounding in his side will not allow it. He grunts, tries to lift himself on his elbows, but this cry will not be suppressed and he falls again.

“Out of the way!”

He nearly does not recognize Jehan’s voice, but the form stepping over him is definitely his.

Jehan tugs the man up by his collar, and his nose is bleeding down the front of his own shirt, and he places that hunting knife once again to exposed skin, this time to the chest now unshielded by his unbuttoned shirt. An attempt to grab his wrist, and Jehan throttles him back and grips his abdomen between his knees.

“Just one franc, monsieur,” he says. “One franc and I leave.”

“I could offer you more than that.”

For once since the confrontation began, all parties are silent. Jehan keeps his legs held firmly to the man’s sides, but looks down at him with all the curiosity and wonder Grantaire is accustomed to.

“I know a man,” he continues. “Needs a few boys to fight for him, make some spare money on the side. You’re good, little one. You and your friend here. You could be something.”

Jehan twirls the tip of his weapon at the man’s sternum. “What is his game?”

“Prize fighting. I think you have a future in it.” The man turns his head and coughs blood and spittle onto the floor beside him. “You let me go and I send him here tomorrow for you. What do you say?”

“I...” Jehan tenses. “If it means I do not have to hurt you further.”

“Fine. Your franc.” The man reaches up weakly and tucks two coins into the breast pocket of Jehan’s coat. “A little extra too, For your troubles.”

“You have brought me more troubles than two francs is worth. I will be here in the afternoon tomorrow. Send your man for me then.”

Grantaire does not register that Jehan has helped him to his feet until they are halfway out of the cafe. A gentle palm rests over his wound, places their shared earnings into his jacket. Both of them are bleeding, but it is nothing much. It will be nothing much.

**-**

There is something fundamentally comforting about the room now that Grantaire occupies it with Jehan. He has returned here from one or two fights before, collapsed onto his bed, done what he could to ensure he woke up the next morning. For reasons he cannot quite explain half-drunk and bloodied, he no longer feels he will have to fight to do so any longer.

Jehan’s nose has finally stopped bleeding. He wipes his face with the one corner of his handkerchief not saturated red and smiles up from the corner of the floor he has claimed as his own.

“I made seven francs today,” he says, as if the words are still foreign to him. Grantaire reminds himself that Jehan was wealthy once. Seven francs was pocket change. And here he is, cleaning blood from his fragile skin and happy to settle on the floor of a rented room and beam over this handful of coins as if he has just stuck a vein of gold.

Grantaire has known days where seven francs was nothing, another handful of money to purchase rounds of drinks with. He has known days he would have killed for that much as well.

“You were shaking,” Grantaire says. He does not know why the memory strikes him so suddenly, but he recalls the tremor in Jehan’s hand as he held the knife against the man at the cafe’s neck in vivid detail.

Jehan gnaws the corner of his lip. “I do not like violence.”

“I must ask why you agreed to meet that man tomorrow.”

“Because I will earn money, and it will be good enough.” He flinches and meets Grantaire’s eyes again. “Or you could. Someday. I am not trained, but. You were a boxer once, you could help.”

Grantaire laughs and shakes his head. “I would rather it be me than yourself. Perhaps... perhaps they’ll be like the boys I trained with. Easy enough to fight off, eh? You watched me a few times, didn’t you?”

“You were the best man at the docks.” Another small trickle of blood works its way down the curve of Jehan’s lip. He brushes it away. “Enjolras was as well.”

He does not want to own the pang that hits low and deep in his heart at that name. He has tried not to speak it much. Maybe under some foolish notion that if he does not invoke his presence, Enjolras will no longer haunt him. He will no longer bang at his shutters and keep him awake and tear cold winds through his all too living bones.

“Did you love him?”

Grantaire does not realize the amount of time he has remained silent until Jehan has risen and sat on the bed beside him.

“It’s alright, you know,” he continues. “If you did. You...know about me. It would be wrong of me to turn my back, if we have both known such loss and I had not been there to console you as well. I could not face myself.”

Enjolras is still wailing at the windows in his head. He is a banshee crying not for deaths foretold, but deaths he was promised. And he will not rest. He will not go silently to his grave.

“I think I did.”

It would have been better without the hesitation beforehand. He wishes he had not taken that second to absorb that sorrowful green of Jehan’s eyes before he closed his own and let him brush his lips against his. It is still at first, small, tentative movements that do not feel like his own, but Jehan takes his hand and he knows this is not unwelcome. There is a palpable pause before those lips part. They are thin, warm, slow and careful without any awkwardness of inexperience, but there is still a fumble, a slip, a scraping of teeth or a sharp breath that stops them, still in the midst of worrying at a lower lip or finding a curve to fit a wandering hand into.

His waist is thinner and his ribcage bonier than Grantaire expects when he feels them through his clothing. The inside of his leg seems too sacred to caress, but his slight startle does not give way to any resistance. Jehan leans deeper into the kiss, runs his hand upwards through the unruly curls at the nape of Grantaire’s neck.

Grantaire’s back is against the bed, and Jehan’s knees to either side of his hips are far more tender than they were as they pinned the man at the cafe, when the now furious movement against his mouth stops. He does not open his eyes until the hands furling his halfway open collar are shaking.

“This isn’t--” Grantaire swallows the knot in his throat. “This isn’t going to fix it.”

“I know.”

“We do not...”

“I know.” Jehan brushes a spot of wetness from Grantaire’s face. “You love him. Don’t worry, darling, they are still here. They are still with us.”

Grantaire blinks back the fog in his eyes, looks up at Jehan’s faltering smile. “That is precisely what I fear.”

Jehan sits up and releases him from between his legs. “I want to use that extra franc. I want to drink this off and give a health to days past and a toast to the things we cannot forget. Whether that inability is for the best or worse is individual preference.”

There are no words Grantaire can find in response, and so he nods and allows Jehan to help him to his feet. The other man is in love as well. He knows that pair of spectacles still resides within his pocket, that he is haunted as well by a more benevolent sort of ghost, that still may softly stroke his cheek or brush his hand in his sleep. Grantaire’s has still not ceased his knocking at the walls.

-

Enjolras has refused to  move from the window since that afternoon. It is night now, and Valjean has yet to muster the heart to take him from that armchair and back into his bed. Rain has begun to fall on Paris, the first rain since the barricades fell.

“What do you think of rain, monsieur?”

He looks up from his reading. Enjolras is still there, staring out at the water as it splashes on the windowsill, but never quite seeming to look at anything in particular.

“I think it’s necessary,” Valjean replies. “It must water the earth, feed the gardens, fill the oceans.”

“Hm.”

The boy has been terse today. It is unlike him to not at least attempt to speak more.

“Why do you ask?” Valjean closes his book. “What does the rain matter to you?”

Enjolras lets his eyelids shut and rests his head back. “I think it is washing them away.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So it's been a little while, huh? Sorry about how late this is, theater and college got in the way of updating this, I've had half of it sitting unfinished for months. Self-beta'd because I felt like I needed to update this soon, so I hope it's not too unpolished!


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> GUESS WHO'S BACK? Sorry I haven't updated in forever, I've been concentrating on other projects and haven't known what to do with this, but hey, have a bit more of this! If you've stuck with this and actually waited for this, I thank you, and I apologize so much.

His name was Feuilly. He did not know his age exactly, but he could not have been terribly older than Enjolras himself. In size, he was not much. With his voice, he did not need to be. His features--black eyes, copper skin, dark and coarse hair that he could never hold down without the aid of a headscarf and was rough on the sharp contours of his jaw--were too harsh and worn to be as gentle as Enjolras knew them. Feuilly smiled as if the room were smiling with him, at times the whole world. For a year or so, Enjolras troubled himself wondering what he had to smile about. He, a man who had labored not an hour in his life, found himself infinitely fascinated and baffled by one who had worked almost every one of his own.

Feuilly appeared consistently in the back room of the Musain or the dining room of the Corinth, at times earlier than the rest, at times after the small space they occupied was already brimming with chattering voices and the oil lamps were dimming. But he was there, nevertheless. He furiously carved a time into his schedule to rail against partitions and kings and taxes, to lend his fiery eloquence to the poor and displaced, to revere the workers and the philosophers and the men before him. Here, Enjolras thought, was one man before a room of wealthy sons and university students and those who fought but had not suffered a day of what they fought against, one stalwart man whose zeal and compassion could have changed the stoniest of hearts stirred the most desolate spirits.

And from the first mention of revolt, he would have given his life to do so.

Perhaps, in that storm of passion and exoneration, Enjolras had neglected to consider that the men beside him were still human. Sacrifice would not always remember to leave fear behind. And so the shot that rang out in place of the tolling of bells at noon was the only funeral knell for a man with no family to bury him, and Enjolras ran as quickly as the uneven roads would allow him to give him his rites.

It took two minutes to bleed out from the neck. He knew this well enough from Combeferre’s studies late into the night, when he noted what may have been relevant and stored it away for some undetermined future. It took two minutes to bleed out from the neck, and there was too much blood seeping between Feuilly’s fingers.

He knelt and positioned Feuilly on his lap. There were, and still are, few times Enjolras heard cries of pain so guttural and unrestrained, He no longer cared what was blood, what was tears, what of any of that was his own. He opened his mouth, but the first words to come were not his own.

“I don’t want to.”

He looked down, found Feuilly staring back at him. His free hand clasped Enjolras’s, and in place of speaking again he shook his head and bit the inside of his lip.

“It’s alright,” Enjolras whispered.

“I don’t want to go, I-- I can’t. It hurts, I don’t want to go.”

The process of reconciling the man before him with the one who had stood, not a day ago, before him and proudly volunteered to die for his country could have taken years. But this was reality, this was a man in his final moments--this was his friend.

Feuilly gripped his hand tighter. “I didn’t...do anything. I didn’t. I could have. I wanted to do something and I...”

“You did everything.”

Feuilly’s gasp for air turned into a sob. He curled into Enjolras’s coat, and his skin was pale, and his breathing was slow, but Enjolras smoothed his hair back from his face and recalled the trilling sound of iron nail against stone during the night.

“This,” Enjolras began, “all of this, will not be in vain. It is yours, and it is mine, and when the people rise again it will be in your name. Do not forget.”

Feuilly struggled for words. He let his eyes shut calmly, stroked Enjolras’s palm with his thumb as his grasp loosened.

Enjolras lifted his hand, kissed the calloused tips of his fingers. “ _Vivent les peuples_.”

“ _Vivent les peuples_.”

-

The walls of Valjean’s gardens are tall. Tree branches rattle up to the top, concealing perhaps what little would have been visible of Paris beyond them. This is not Paris, This is a small oasis somewhere hidden within the city, obscure and unfindable and with no clear escape. Not one Enjolras has the energy to seek out.

The man has moved a chair into the garden for him, wicker and high-backed and positioned where a bench once sat between those infernal rose bushes that steal his rest at night. They are lovelier in the daytime, but he cannot forgive them.

The lady of the house wears black like widow’s weeds. Her face remains uncovered by crepe, but it shields her loose, brown hair and dark fabric envelopes what little body must be beneath it. She sweeps through the garden herself at times, her small footsteps beneath the hoops of her skirts making her appear to glide, ghostly, upon the pathways.

“You were not married,” he says when he sees her again.

The girl stops, as he intends her to, and observes him closely. She is made of familiar fragments--owl-like eyes, a slender jaw, a light olivine tint to her skin, a small frame, a certain quickness and intelligence in her gaze--and he cannot place where each piece belongs in his own memory.

“You know nothing,” she replies.

“That man is your father, I assume. You have not left his house. You were never married to any man upon that barricade, you are no widow.”

“I thought you might be difficult, monsieur, but I did not know you would be intolerable.”

Enjolras forgets momentarily that he cannot rise to look her in the eye, and instead grasps the handles of his chair. “You cannot know my loss.”

“I know who you are, though.” She sits upon the bench her father moved to the other side of the path. “Your name is Enjolras. You led the insurrection that killed those men, the ones on the barricade near here. I would have married one of them.”

“Marius Pontmercy,” he says. “He spoke of you, if you are called Cosette. Do not doubt my sympathy for your loss, but I have lost my country, any chance I had to free her myself, my basic right to sacrifice myself in her name--”

“And so have they all.” Cosette’s small hands ball up the fabric of her skirts, but she remains composed, despite the tension building in her shoulders. “I think you do not believe the men there had any more to lose than yourself. You have loved them and lost them, I know this. Marius spoke of them as if he had known them all his life. Do you not think they knew that loss as well? Do you not think there are friends and lovers and families somewhere to mourn them?”

Enjolras finds himself unable to look directly at her, whether it is the inability of his eyes to focus or the staunch determination in her own. A wind blows through the garden, sticky sweet with summer buds and uncomfortably warm on his cheeks.

“I mourn them,” he says.

“As do I.”

A few browning petals from the nearby magnolia spin to the ground. Enjolras pinches one that alights on his leg between his fingers. It is soft, cracking at the edges where it has begun to wither and a dead tan color seeping into the blushing pink. A slight bit of pressure, and it begins to break.

“I mourn them because he would have,” Cosette continues. “I didn’t know them, no, but they brought something to his life. Enough that he would have died for them.”

Enjolras allows the rest of the petal to crumble on his leg. “He died bravely--”

“Don’t talk about that.”

Something in her voice cracks. It is not Enjolras’s subject to broach. Whether or not Marius had left this world the way he did, gun in hand and eyes ablaze and spirit willing and every bit the revolutionary Enjolras had hoped for, he had not died the man Cosette must have known, or the man she wants to keep safe in her memory.

“I am sorry.” He finally lets the admission fall from his lips, his stare still fixed on the paths of falling petals. “I hope you might forgive me someday.”

Cosette stands with a light crinkling of crepe. “It is not a matter of forgiving you. You do not need to be forgiven. I think, Monsieur Enjolras, that you need to reflect.”

When the old man comes for him, Cosette has been gone for the length of ten petal falls. Enjolras allows Valjean to sweep him up with no thought of protest now. His back aches and his temples pound, but he tries not to complain.

“You could have saved Marius,” he says as Valjean sets him in bed.

The man shakes his head. “He was dead. There was nothing to be done for him. You have not stopped speaking of the dead like this. As if I could have spared them somehow.”

Enjolras bites the inside of his cheek. Jean Valjean, for all his apparent strength, could not bring them back. There was no point in letting him go and bringing them back to provide the same service as the guard and present them to their families in tatters. But the pain in his chest will not stop screaming that he should have given as much as the rest, of all men at that barricade. He had promised to die--for the killing of Le Cabuc, for the death of the guardsmen, for a future for those he would never know.

“There is some purpose in you.”

Enjolras lifts his eyes towards Valjean, and the man’s face is lit softly through the curtains.

“You live for a reason. There are things you must do yet, whether those are small or tremendous.”

Enjolras adjusts his shoulders on the cushion behind him, wincing when the not yet healed skin of his wound stretches, and cannot find anything more to say.

Valjean sets a small book next to his hand--the copy of Voltaire he has been trying to read for days. “They would be proud of you, your friends.”

The wind blows past the house once again, rustling in the treetops, and Enjolras nods.

-

“They have killed him.”

Enjolras glanced back at the spy bound to the pole behind him. The man’s ruddy, thick face was drenched in sweat, his gaze attentive as his features slacked and drooped. His pupils followed Enjolras’s fingers as they traced the trigger of his gun, and he pursed his lips.

Enjolras spoke past the knot welling in his throat. “Your friends have just shot you.”

The spy did not move. If he had not resolved to die long ago, death was no great shock to him. His sluggish glare rested next somewhere to Enjolras’s right, to an object he found fascinating enough to observe with the slightest smirk raising the corner of his lip. Enjolras swallowed deeply and turned.

Combeferre had not moved from his position. His torn, pale handkerchief, spotted at the edge with soot and blood, still swung limply at the end of his cane, the placid horror of Saint Sebastian transfixed on his face. The others had begun to move, to tend once more to the injured and collect themselves.

“Combeferre?” Enjolras said.

Combeferre shook his head. “They have killed him.”

In all his years, four spent sharing his living space with the man beside him, whose shade had fled his mortal form and left him stiff and looking towards the light that penetrated the broken window, he did not believe he had ever witnessed such abject sorrow and terror.

He touched the end of the cane. Combeferre’s arm suddenly tensed and jerked away from him with a pitiful grunt. Enjolras repeated his name softly, followed him towards a boy with a wounded leg.

“I need to attend to him,”Combeferre muttered. There seemed to be no air behind his voice, and Enjolras was fortunate to pick out his words among the newfound clutter of sound. “My job is unfinished. They are not all dead simply because he...”

“He was not unwilling.”

“Nor am I, nor are you.”

Combeferre finished wrapping the boy’s leg, wiping his shaking, bloodied hands down his leather apron. The expected objection when Enjolras knelt beside him and grasped his wrist did not come, and he found Combeferre’s hand gripping his own until it felt light and numb.

It struck Enjolras, for a brief, innocuous moment, that the carbines in Combeferre’s belt were gone.

“Are you in need of a weapon?” he asked.

Combeferre shook his head. “I’ve taken some from the guardsmen. He...he had my mine. I can’t go back to-- Reload his musket, it’s against the wall. I’ll-- I’ll find something, he needed it, I had to--”

Enjolras’s hand brushed his shoulder, and something within Combeferre cracked. The chatter around him collapsed on itself, allowing some mangled cry from behind the hand pressed to his mouth to sound throughout the tap room. Enjolras looked to the men behind him, clustered, their heads bowed, their faces grim, some hands squeezed as if in mutual prayer and yet more heads rested on comforting shoulders. There had not been a moment of silence to mourn the loss of the first of them, to linger on the death of Bahorel before the next shots had gone off and the half a decade they had fought beside him was not allowed to matter. The death of Jean Prouvaire, the unsteady calm it had given on both sides of the barricade, had left them a singular moment to mourn what they had not and would not have time to.

Marius took Enjolras by the arm and drew him up. He had not felt this before, this surge of helplessness dropping to the center of his chest and settling there, unbudging. After all, he was their leader, it was his duty to be unwavering in his actions.

“Leave him, just a moment,” Marius whispered.

Enjolras looked down, noticed Marius’s hand clung once more to Courfeyrac’s shoulder. None of the men had yet disjoined, not even the youngest and smallest of them, except the lone phantom that remained of Combeferre, still on his knees and biting back tears as if they could not hear him,

“You know what you must do,” Enjolras said, and felt Marius’s fingers clench his arm tightly as if to stop him,

Combeferre shook his head. “What, kill them? Claim vengeance?”

“You told me you would share my fate, you told me--”

“Not until I must.”

A pair of stern, calculating gray eyes turned on him, their harshness unobscured by the fog that beaded Combeferre’s spectacles. They were shot red at the corners, and Enjolras could not bring himself to look away.

“Believe me, Enjolras, I know my duty, and it is not revenge. If it were, I should deserve every grieving son and father that would come to me for the same. You know it as well. Act as if you do for once.” None had noticed him stand, but Combeferre took a step towards the street once more. “I am sorry, for all of your losses.”

“We’ll begin again later.”

The voice did not come from Enjolras. He glanced over his shoulder, saw Marius push forward, his head held proudly and his back straight.

“There comes a time for mourning,” Marius continued. “We must take what we are given.”

Joly mustered a tilted smile, held out his unoccupied hand until Combeferre allowed himself to take it. Enjolras himself was lured back towards the men by Marius’s quiet, soothing voice, urging him to return as well. He savored this, this final moment of silence, still surrounded by as many of the men he had spent these past four years with as he could manage, with the shared foreknowledge that it would not come again.

-

At noon, the same room once thick with swarming, drunken peasants and cheers as Grantaire and Jehan pounded their stolen franc out of a large man whose bleeding mingled with their own is quiet. Stark sunlight cuts through the dank interior, catching the little dust motes in its path that whirl as Jehan shuts the door behind them. Grantaire inhales, and the scent is not so much of alcohol than leftover sweat from the men who drank it the night before. There are so few that the task of picking out their potential patron should be easier than it is. The heads of the people that have dragged themselves to the cafe this afternoon are bowed inwards towards one another, in low, deep conversation, and he cannot make out a face were it his own father’s.

Desperation drives him to look for the unnamed brute whose mouth connected with his bruised knuckles last evening, and he finds only the dark stain on the floor where he spit blood. He catches Jehan’s arm when he sees him step towards the bar.

“Deal with crooks sober,” he says.

Jehan draws his foot back. “What makes you call him a crook this early?”

“Intuition. Little else, but it’s never failed me before.” Grantaire looks out the window. “He’s late.”

His own uncanny sense of time is bothersome--nagging when he himself is behind, frustrating when he must wait on someone else.

“There isn’t another level?” Jehan asks.

Grantaire peers at the darker corners of the rooms, finds no stairs, doors, hatches on the floor. He frowns and squeezes between the tables, tightly packed where they have been previously shoved together and leaving wide, awkward spaces where they once were. The workers on their daily breaks spare him none of their sparse time with sideways glances.

Five minutes. Their host has left them five minutes, glancing about this forsaken, unknown little alcove of a place that has never once entered his internal registry of mildly worthwhile sections of Paris.

It is not until he sees the subtle bobbing of a head of thick, black, pomaded hair that he understands he is wrong.

Their patron is taller than Grantaire when he stands, not quite reaching Jehan’s height--but few do. His skin is delicate, pale, but not quite the reddish white of untouched Gallic stock. And his eyes--his eyes have been dark before, but they are a fulvous, canine sort of color in the stark sun that now touches upon them, one that suits the bloody color of his mouth and his long teeth that have begun to yellow despite his years.

“I believe,” he says, “I am at the mercy of some kind of cruel joke.”

Grantaire unconsciously positions himself in front of Jehan. “As am I. Don’t worry, you do grow accustomed to it eventually. What do I have the honor of addressing you as in the daytime? I assume you are a different sort of monster in the light.”

He laughs, and Grantaire has never wanted to see him laugh. “Perhaps I am, but Montparnasse is a fine enough name for both.”

There are imperfections to him that Grantaire had not noticed in the dark. Under the night, he was perfect, immaculate. But there is an asymmetrical quirk to the left side of his mouth that holds it in a perpetual simper, hollows where the thinness of his face is not so much slender and fashionable as starved, sparse pockmarks on his cheeks. It is easy enough to forget he is a child of the streets when all is smoothed by midnight, just barely less so now, but Grantaire has never quite been fooled by glamor.

“I thought I sent you back to whatever hole you nest in,” Grantaire says.

Montparnasse rolls back his shoulders and pulls himself up to his full size. He seems to grow, to stretch the spaces in his spine and elongate his neck and find height where none had been. “And I thought you had returned to yours. But we were both mistaken, and it has been less than three days since last we spoke, and here we are. Fate. Or perhaps simply unfortunate coincidences. Either way, you’ve crawled back to me.”

He looks over Grantaire’s head, shows a sliver of teeth as he takes Jehan in. “Especially you. Come searching for work one night, I refuse you, the man you beat into the ground happens to be mine, and here you are. And me, offering work to the men who managed to best one of his own. God, I’ve been a fool before, but I did think I had outgrown it somewhat.”

Jehan has side-stepped Grantaire before he can think to stop him once more. He does not need to protect him, but damn it all if the urge isn’t overwhelming nowadays. But all he allows is his fists to ball up at his sides as Jehan approaches Montparnasse as a starved animal circling a scrap of food before another nips at its fleabitten skin and sends it fleeing.

“If you’re as eager for workers as I believe you are,” he says, “why did you turn me away?”

Montparnasse observes their company, and the pinkish veins of many a sleepless night appear to stretch at the edges of his flickering eyes. The uneven corner of his mouth hitches into a snarl.

“Come with me.” He slides past them and towards the door. “Some things are not to be discussed in polite company, Prouvaire, but I’m not certain you’re capable of making the distinction..”

“Wait.”

He skids his heel against the wood, and his shoulders heave in a quiet, long sigh. “What?”

“Empty your pockets,” Jehan says.

Before he can accuse Montparnasse of disobeying, Grantaire grabs at the coat that flutters at his face like a swarm of hungry blackbirds. It is far too heavy for the wet June heat, but from the way the seams have been stitched and restitched, the elbows patched, the hem dirtied where it falls at Montparnasse’s knees, the edges of the collar grayish and frayed, the boy does not have enough other coats to consider whether they are seasonal.

Montparnasse raises an expectant brow. “I know you, you don’t trust me enough to show my hand without considering I may still have a card under my cuffs. Empty my pockets yourself, both of you.”

Grantaire holds the bundle of fabric out at arm’s length, locates the collar, lets it fall into its usual position, and reaches into the pockets. Empty. Save for a spare silver coin, he finds nothing so much as loose threads and the the remains of stolen bread.

He is almost finished with his inspection when Jehan holds out his hand, gestures for him to let him have a go.

Grantaire weighs the coat for irregularities, again discovering none of its secrets. “You told him to show his pockets, there’s nothing--”

“For a man who professes his distrust, you trust him far too much. Hand me the coat.”

Montparnasse grins as Jehan roughly grasps the coat, takes it by the bottom hem, and shakes it. For a moment, he seems as dumbfounded as Grantaire, baffled lines set deep in his forehead and eyes narrowed to curious slits. Another tentative shake, and they widen to their usual teacup saucer size once more.

In the lining of the coat, where it pinched its wearer’s waist into waspish thinness and splayed at the hips, is a small rip. Jehan’s hand is just slender enough to work its way beneath the fabric. grope about, and remove a thin, short knife.

“Clever little bird,” Montparnasse mutters. “Keep it until we’re finished. Any requests before we’re off?”

“Roll up your sleeves.”

“Clever, clever little bird...” He unbuttons his cuffs and pushes his sleeves nearly to his shoulders, revealing thin, sinewy arms and no hidden weapons to speak of. “Are you satisfied?”

Jehan tightens his lips, reads the man’s every irregularity with a scrutiny only reserved for the fine print of antique books. Grantaire must admit, he has not often been fond of what usually follows.

“Alright.” Jehan nods curtly and sweeps his hand towards the door. “It is your place to lead. I believe I’ve done all I can to ensure we will be safely escorted.”

“You don’t trust me either?”

Jehan pockets the blade. “You held a knife to my throat, I’m not one to easily forgive a threat on my life.”

Montparnasse observes him with just as much care.  His gaze, though brief, picks their smallest pieces apart with a kind of careful,surgical precision, as if he knows just where to look for unprotected areas, easy places to strike, opportunities to take--a weak ankle, a crick in the neck, an advantageous height difference, poor vision on one side, a prominent artery. And Grantaire knows it takes him no more than a minute to discern how he might rid himself of them.

With a tilt of his head and an assumption that they will follow, Montparnasse opens the door. “Excellent, Prouvaire. I’d hoped you wouldn’t.”


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Second update today, and as of now everything I've written on the main story. Enjoy this oddly Montparnasse centric chapter. I wasn't counting on him being a major character either.

Paris, how Grantaire remembers it, is thick strokes, choppy lines that end where they shouldn’t, begin where one least expects, follow gentle curves when they do not shoot sharply and hastily towards no real end.

Montparnasse’s Paris is fluid, running like desperate waters that carve out stream beds where they find a fissure in the earth as their last grows scarce. None of the nooks he crawls into are familiar like the streets Grantaire knows. They seem old, archaic even, but he knows--he thinks he knows, at least--that they couldn’t have gone unnoticed by him for so long if there were such ancient things.

Plants have begun to sprout places they shouldn’t, finding any damp corner to plant quick, deep roots and hope for rain. But the rain brings with it the current haze of stench still disseminating from the last storm. Grantaire looks back as Jehan untucks his cravat and holds it to his nose.

“A bit overwhelming?” Montparnasse asks.

Jehan shakes his head.

“You’d speak if you weren’t trying not to breathe it in.”

The alley is so terribly quiet that Grantaire distinguishes a fourth set of footsteps the moment he hears them, just out of rhythm enough with the man leading them. There is a short, sharp birdcall, from somewhere he cannot place. The sound stops for a moment, resumes in such perfect time with the scuff of Montparnasse’s shoes. He hopes Jehan has the knife close at hand.

“Not to worry.” Montparnasse gestures with a tilt of his head towards a crevice Grantaire would have overlooked. A dark skinned man--his beard a thick strap about his chin with no mustache, one eye closed by a scar cutting down from his eyebrow to his cheek--emerges, pays them no heed, and proceeds at Montparnasse’s side.

A skinny, graying man joins next, then one more, then two, then three. Grantaire begins to wonder if the chirping is from a bird at all.

“I had a test,” Montparnasse says, “arranged for the men I was supposed to contact today. I had a few contacts who hadn’t yet scattered, thought they might be a better challenge than the one you bested before.”

Jehan lowers the fabric covering his mouth. “And where are we taking this test?”

“I know places. There’s an empty storehouse down the way. No one else has the patience to find it amid all the clutter, ergo no one has torn it down yet.”

“How do you know about it?”

“I used to sleep there. Comfortable place, once you get used to the rats.”

Grantaire knows Montparnasse is grinning without seeing his face.

Another man joins them as they near a wooden structure, its outside dark and deteriorating from years of rain. The men disappear into a shadowy doorway.

“Whatever it is you have planned,” Grantaire calls, “I’ll be the first. I don’t want Jehan to fight if he doesn’t--”

Jehan grabs his arm. “Don’t worry about me, do what he asks.”

They enter the building. Inside, it is nothing more than a wide, open space, the floor of hard stone, a loft above where crates may have once sat. The smell turns from one of the refuse of the city to dull, musty scent, heavy in Grantaire’s chest. The men that follow Montparnasse--more than he remembers, certainly--stand at the walls.

“Do you still insist on taking the first fight?” Montparnasse asks, scoping out the men about him.

Grantaire nods. He expected a fight today, somehow.

“Good, Since you’ve been kind enough to play along so far, I’ll let you choose. Any of the men behind me would prove a challenging fight, some more than others.”

Grantaire’s eyes adjust to the gray murk over Montparnasse’s shoulder. Many of them resemble the sorts of men he practiced savate with. Rough, scrawny from lack of food, muscled from no lack of work. Only one is any different from the rest. Perhaps that is all he needs to win.

He points at the tall man slouched behind the others. “That one.”

Montparnasse gestures to the man. “Guelemer. He’s chosen his fate.”

-

Guelemer is all made of bulges, of thick lumps of tan flesh that compound upon each other in no natural order, and are taught with pale scars from the crown of his shaven scalp to every piece of skin left exposed by his unbuttoned waistcoat. He kicks off his heavy shoes, worn so that his toes jut out in the front, saunters up to measure himself against Grantaire, and the edge of his thick, curly beard scrapes the top of his head.

“You’re certain?” Jehan asks, and Grantaire grins in response.

“I’m quite certain.”

He watches closely as Montparnasse positions himself opposite him, amongst the lean, eager faces of the opponents Grantaire had passed over. A red-haired man with patches of stubble and deep eyes leans over his knees and snarls, as if he expects Jehan to flinch.

“If you are entirely satisfied with your choice,” Montparnasse says, “I would suggest you begin before we starve waiting for you to finish.”

Grantaire looks up at Guelemer as he rolls his sleeves over his elbows. The man before him says nothing, only nods and pushes his right foot back into the muck.

Guelemer is slow to block the first strike that he aims at his stomach, his arms too thick and heavy to move swiftly enough to offset the second. It lands against his side, ripples momentarily, but hardly drives him back at all. Grantaire springs away on his heels, fists still held aloft.

The two men circle, and Jehan observes Grantaire--the balls of his feet dusting the ground, his shoulders slouched forward, his brows lowered. Guelemer makes to strike, but merely brushes past Grantaire’s shoulder. As if he hasn’t taken the warning, Grantaire plants his feet once more. The voices of the men behind them rise in a collective hiss. They know Guelemer, they know when he has won, they know that any smaller man who dares steady himself before him is only moments away from being thrown.

There is no resistance as Guelemer launches himself forward, wraps his swollen forearms about Grantaire’s middle. He traps his arms at his sides until they seem to bow outwards at the elbow, and steps backwards to pull his feet from the ground entirely. A cheer stings in Jehan’s ears as Guelemer adjusts his grip with a crack from one man or the other. It will be finished soon. 

“Please.” Montparnasse crosses his arms. “Do refrain from killing the man, Guelemer. He may be of some--”

Another crack, this one undeniably from Guelemer. There is blood pouring down his face and matting in his beard, and blood staining Grantaire’s forehead where not a moment ago, he snapped his neck back and rammed it into Guelemer’s flat, crooked nose. He stumbles a moment with his arms still tight about his opponent. There are groans gurgling from the back of his throat, and the moment he stops to adjust his grip, Grantaire twists his hips and lands firmly on the flats of his feet. His arms are still wound back to strike, only in caution, as he does not seem to expect to have to use them.

Guelemer, one hand clutching blindly at his sullied face, swings with no more aim than an old man whipping at gamin with his cane. Grantaire has only to duck beneath a few wild fists, side-step a final sway of Guelemer’s massive frame, squat firmly, and sweep his leg outwards to fell him in a motion that is as silent as the giant’s cry is loud when the base of his skull hits the ground.

“Stop!”

Montparnasse raises a single hand and places himself between the two. The crowd of once lively and vocal men behind him has been horrifically silent, but Jehan only now notices them, One moves to help Guelmer to his knees.

“God’s sakes, don’t kill him,” Montparnasse hisses as his man is escorted to the edge of the half-circle once more. “You’ve done well enough without causing him permanent damage, I should say. Leave it at that.”

“And if I leave it,” Grantaire says, his limbs still taught, “what is my reward?”

“I told you, you’ve proven yourself. I think I would be a fool not to consider you.”

He straightens. “Consider?”

“ _ Hire  _ you,” Montparnasse adds hastily.

Jehan doesn’t dare applaud him around these men, but he meet Grantaire’s eyes and grins as the man regains his lost breath. There is a joy tight in the center of his chest he has not felt in weeks, some sense of assurance, some knowledge that, despite their circumstance, they will be alright. It is difficult to allow himself to feel safe amongst these characters, but nevertheless, he smiles until the corners of his mouth ache and throws his arms about Grantaire’s shoulders as he returns to him.

“Best it stopped when it did,” Grantaire whispers. “I don’t think my side could have taken much more.”

The men drag Guelemer and prop him against the wall behind him, dabbing at his face with rags and the edges of their shirts.

“Prouvaire.”

Jehan looks up, and Montparnasse has not moved to assist his fallen companion. He steps towards them, one hand deep in the pocket of his coat, the other holding his hat over his chest respectfully. He bows his head in one quick, courteous tilt before addressing them again,

“Surely you did not expect to live on Grantaire’s work?” His eyes flicker over Jehan again, from his bowed knees to his slumped shoulders. “It was you who finished the man at the cafe that night, or have I heard wrong? He tells me it was a skinny little thing, tall, with badly shorn red hair. And certainly that description does no justice to your friend.”

Jehan lets one arm linger behind Grantaire’s neck. “I’ll fight if I must. Only if I--”

“Then you will.”

Jehan surveys the men one final time. None of them have turned to him yet, all prodding at Guelemer, patching his wounds as best they can, attempting to shake him from his stupor. He has seen these men snap to attention at one gesture from Montparnasse, and yet they stay--they are not called for.

Jehan swallows. “You?”

“You can always say no, little bird. But I know your heart, I know it would grieve you to be separated.”

It is as if he expects Jehan to refuse, to shy away from him and accept his fate and wander the streets rather than raise his fists in combat.

“You were on your back in a minute when we fought,” Grantaire spits. “Are you sure you’re enough of a match?”

Montparnasse purses his lips. “I’ve never been arrested, my friend. Do you think I would be where I am now if I had been weak enough to get myself caught?”

“One condition,” Jehan interjects, “and I’ll fight.”

“Your contract?”

Jehan unbuttons his waistcoat, his undershirt, and shoves them into Grantaire’s arms. His shoes and socks are next--some time ago, they were still new and unsullied, and he would not have kicked them aside as he does, but the pavements of Paris have worn scuffs and rips into them that make them that much easier to shove away with the kind of force that makes Montparnasse reconsider his hesitance. He rolls the hems of his too-short trousers to mid calf, tight enough that he is certain they won’t fall.

“Fight me fairly,” he says. “Like they do at the docks. If we aren’t abiding any other rules, I want to make certain you--”

“Don’t have the opportunity to pull another knife on you?” Montparnasse throws his top hat to one of his men and unbuttons his coat. Without so much as a faint whistle, he calls a tall, graying gentleman to his side to carefully places his coat, socks, shoes over his arm. Another--thick and stout, his blondish hair closely cropped, his chin indistinguishable from his neck--takes his cue to step behind him as the taller man pulls Montparnasse’s shirt over his head and steps back.

The corset that shapes his middle is a dirty shade of ivory, the bones verging on stabbing through their thinning sheaths, but still lending that signature smooth curve to his waist. The man behind him lets the laces loose and removes it delicately, scurrying as quickly as his short legs will allow to rejoin the crowd.

Underneath Montparnasse’s many stripped layers is a broad linen band, adjusted to flatten a moderately sized chest, or enough that it can be easily concealed beneath his shirt and not apparent at all until he crosses his arms.

“You asked, Prouvaire,” he says. “Unless you’re concerned I’ve somehow managed to slip a knife into there as well. Though, admittedly, you have more than likely seen grisettes reach between their breasts for a coin or two.”

He steps back until he is opposite Jehan once more, just as far apart as he’d set Guelemer and Grantaire. His arms are thin enough that Jehan sees his sinews contracting as he raises them, curling his pale, red-knuckled fingers into fists and bending at the knee to stabilize his position.

“Come now, you said you’d fight.” Montparnasse stretches his neck with a distinct pop. “I expect whatever anatomy your opponent has bears little on your decision, or else...I have to say, I may have felt sorry challenging you.

“Look at you, Prouvaire. There are shadows between your ribs. I can see the veins under your skin. I could knock you on your back with a deep breath. Either you’re more than you look, or I should find myself new friends if they’re so easily felled by the likes of you. No stance, either. At least put your fists up, perhaps your hands if you mean to surrender.”

Jehan does not flinch until Montparnasse is close enough that he can feel his breath cold on his collarbone. “Defend yourself.”

One sharp kick to the knees, and Jehan’s legs collapse under him. He barely saves his cheek from scraping the floor, but not the heels of his hands, which sting as he rolls himself onto his side and exposes them to the air. Jehan pushes himself up onto his shoulder, but a well-placed foot to his sternum sends him gasping and to the ground once more, sprawled flat as the sharp bones in his shoulders strike it and a low whine vibrates in his throat. His vision finally focuses enough to watch as Montparnasse stands over him, spits on the ground beside his head.

“Get up.”

Jehan sits up on his elbows cautiously, finding that Montparnasse has retreated when he regains some bit of coherency.

“I’m not helping you stand,” he says. “But I believe you deserve a chance to make something of yourself. This will be your last.”

Jehan waits for Montparnasse to strike again as he rises. The man is still poised to advance, the musculature of his arms and his legs coiled and wound as if he is prepared to break that tension at any moment into Jehan’s unprotected middle.

There are no more jeers and hollers from the crowd. Jehan rises to a reverent silence he is not certain he deserves. At a twitch of Montparnasse’s brow, he sets his feet apart, tenses his arms, makes certain their eyes are firmly set upon one another before he lunges forward.

His fist strikes hard and fast at the center of Montparnasse’s chest. His opponent stumbles back, still catching himself on his heel, but letting out succession of quick, sharp gasps to stabilize himself once more.

It will be easy to take the breath out of him. He knows this from frequent discussions of wounded insurgents from years past, knows that the cloth binding his chest will prevent his lungs from refilling even more quickly than the men he has witnessed struggling for air with bayonet slashes to their chests.

But his shoulders do not heave. He breathes rapidly, but steadily, in the diaphragmatic manner of an opera singer, does not twist his bound chest as much as his gracefully articulated hips to wind his blows back. He is slower, more fluid--Jehan often finds himself hitting before him, but he is not easily driven back, and when his own punches and kicks come, they are meticulous, precise, and more difficult to block than they appear.

Jehan swings himself to the left to dodge a high kick to his side. His ankles teeter under him, and he barely salvages his balance before an unexpected elbow sends him wavering again to duck from it. In the brief instant he sees Montparnasse’s eyes again, something within the man aligns as it has not before. There is an intelligence to those eyes, more than the instinctive cleverness of a hound on the scent of blood. A cruel sort of thoughtfulness, a scavenger’s methodic lucidity, not so much turned ferocious by deprivation, but turned calculating. He has been reared on barrenness, brought up to contrive his way to fulfillment. He cannot rid himself of it even when there is nothing at stake.

Montparnasse cannot utilize his upper body, and so he pivots on his lower half. He rests his weight soundly in his hips, does nothing more with his arms but hold them at the ready until a direct, painful blow is required to punctuate his movement. His breaths do not come deeply, and so they come quickly. Jehan learns to never assume him out of breath, but rather to wind him before he can retaliate. His own defense is not strong, but as long as he is able to hit, he is also able to keep Montparnasse at bay. Jehan knows he has learned his game--his legs are unsteady, his height makes him unbalanced, but he is faster, able to thrash more briskly, but with less aim and less power. His strength is in his arms.

Jehan stumbles on his next attempt to step past a kick, does not avoid the recoil deftly enough to prevent Montparnasse from catching his right arm behind his back. He does not see the motion, but he feels as Montparnasse pulls it further back and hears the sickly popping that comes as he forces it upwards. It is as if he can see the pain that accompanies it. His vision is blotched black, then fantastical shades of green and violet and finally a pounding red as he steadies his feet and forces his spine to straighten once more, but he faces Montparnasse nonetheless.

“The fight ends on your word,” Montparnasse calls, and his voice seems so very distant as blood pounds in Jehan’s ears. “Don’t prove yourself as daft as I thought you. Be sensible, little bird.”

And so he is. With one last force of will, Jehan raises his left arm--his right limp at his side--and punches his jaw. Montparnasse’s head turns so suddenly that Jehan fears it will snap on his neck. But he finds himself once more, red dribbling from his flushed lips, and with another precisely placed elbow aimed into Jehan’s sternum, topples him to the ground.

Jehan has no time to recover himself before Montparnasse kicks him onto his stomach, kneels down on his back, and pulls his arm behind him once more. The pain racks him enough that he cannot hear Montparnasse until his mouth is almost at his ear.

“Is the fight done, Prouvaire?”

There is no strength in him to rise. Jehan coughs and sputters a moment before nodding as best he can. “It’s done.”

“Then you’ve joined your friend.”

Another muffled pop, and a burst of pain through his right shoulder.

“Stand up,” Montparnasse says. “Your shoulder should be fine. Trust me, I wouldn’t have done much to you that I couldn’t fix myself.”

The dull ache begins to subside, and Jehan notices his right arm is no longer limp. There is still a pang in his side as he moves it, but it is beginning to subside even as he stands.

“Welcome, Prouvaire.” Montparnasse has already begun to unroll his trousers, and the blonde man is in the process of tightening his corset strings.

Jehan blurts the moment Grantaire’s mouth begins to move. “I...I lost.”

“You lost bravely. I had no expectation you would emerge victorious, but any man who can fight as long and fiercely as you has potential.” This time, the uneven corner of his mouth lifts into a smile. He observes both men once more, now with less animosity and wider eyes. “We have things to work on, certainly, but...you’re coming home with me. Both of you.”

-

There are memories on these streets. Small feet and hands, large eyes, tangled hair, dirt matted into the knees of trousers that fall on short, pale legs. Paris does not remember, but the streets--the streets seldom forget.

There are distinct memories of a small, waifish child, thin with too many days and too little bread. Straight, dark hair tousled into what could have been ringlets. Polished girls’ shoes that ripped at the soles that drew drops of blood and childish tears wiped from ruddy cheeks with small, small hands. A dress that should have reached swollen ankles dusting skinny knees, a dress once sweet and blue and at that moment a dusty sort of gray.

Don’t love it too much, they said as they stared down at the small, mewling bundle that would someday wear that dusty dress and those cut shoes. Don’t love it, because sometimes they die, and if they don’t die, they expect something. The ones who took care of the child were children themselves, twelve at most, six at least. All that same shade of dust and red. They did not respond to gap-toothed smiles and babbling--they responded to a hair tug, a shriek, a face pink with wailing. And so the child learned to scream until it hurt, because it would not hurt when they heard. The adults would listen too at times, see a little girl’s dress and shoes and give a coin or a crust. It hurt even less then.

There was fear in the darkness, when the treading of those shoes upon pavement was loud and echoing in the black, when the police came for the rowdy boys that broke windows and threw pebbles. Tall people in top hats and bonnets would be kind in the day. Children and rats on the streets at night were one in the same to them. Screams in the night would attract the wrong attention or blend with the others. Don’t love it too much, because if it hasn’t died, they’ll take it away.

But they didn’t. The dress was years old, the bottom was cut, replaced with something of a skirt to hide legs that grew too long. The shoes were men’s, too big, but suitable. The tangled curls were combed straight once more by thin fingers and vanity. Ten years. One first learns to pick pockets by day, too old to beg successfully and just fast and limber enough to slip in and out of crowds for a pinch of money. The shoes were too loud, and they were carried when they were, sometimes used to inconspicuously hide stolen silver and copper coins. 

Petty theft was too simple, too dull, too easy for how little money it brought. The boys did not love too much, but they fought, and the boys raised by the streets were not like the rich ones, would not refuse a tussle with long hair and a ragged skirt. Blood would run down that dirty blue that was once a dress, and eventually, it was not the child’s own. Watching the older boys hurt came with a sort of steely remorse--painful, but necessary. There was no more hesitation in stealing more than money. Pocket watches shone more than the buckles on those old men’s shoes and the pins that accumulated on that skirt.

Clothes did not shine, wouldn’t bring in money, were too easy. Twelve years, the skirt was still long enough, the seams of the old dress were starting to stretch thin. The shoes were better. Trousers were rolled and pinned at swollen ankles by small hands, but shirts. Shirts were obstructed, wouldn’t button properly without a gap or a break. Don’t love it too much, it will wrap its chest down with bandages from the medical school and it will not wake until you cut them. The nuns wore linens, to cast off sinful gazes, as if any were directed towards those old women with dusty faces, dusty hands, dusty glances. A girl, blonde, eleven, came with one the next day.

The boys were older now, more willing to punch until a tooth broke against the ground or a nose went crooked or an eye swelled shut. Nothing more than a loose back tooth was sacrificed to their games. They were afraid, of small hands with swollen knuckles and a lean face--still thin from too many days and too little money going towards bread. The rich boys wanted sunken cheeks, fashionable wasting. The not-so-gentle hacking of a knife and a pile of thick, black hair that was shaken out of men’s shoes after it fell, money spent not on food, but thick, waxy ointment to slick the rough edges that knife left. Less fashionable wasting than wasting made fashionable. No difference unless one looked too closely.

Some days were for food, some days were for a black coat at thirteen that would not fit until sixteen, trousers pinched at the ankles, a shirt that laid flat where it shouldn’t, shoes that were not too long. Pickpocketing couldn’t have bought any of that, nor could mere theft. When the boys were afraid, they spoke to the men, who needed someone unafraid of swollen knuckles and whose remorse, if it insisted on still being present, was steely.

The dark held no fear. Not to one who lit it with a flash of silver and newly camouflaged within it. No longer dusty, but black, tailored to slide through the slender cracks of the still fleeing day. Awareness of the dark brought with it mistrust of the day. Light offered no kindness to deeds done in its absence. Light did not conceal. The day that befriended torn shoes and tangles that were not curls was no friend to what became of that child. Both of Janus’s faces were sweet. The one turned towards the day would not bite to draw blood.

When the boys were no longer there to be afraid, the men were in their place. The men that taught the face turned to night to gnash its teeth while it smiled, who could not do so much themselves. Woe to you, o land, when your king is a child. And so the princes ate in the morning, but fed in until the dawn came to starve them. If the men would not follow in respect, they would follow in dread, such deep, deep dread that among them there would not be one to speak its name. The angel still says not to fear, turns its fine features towards them, reddish lips and youthful yellow eyes where it was once aflame. It is a warning few might heed.

-

There is paper on the walls. Not fashionable--dull puce, eaten brown and yellow by water, some kind of gray green, arranged in an awkward floral pattern that Grantaire is certain hasn’t been used since the days of the old regime. The seams between sheets of wallpaper are not quite straight, are peeling back like flakes of skin. He touches one, and it comes off between his thumb and forefinger. But it is still paper. He swears he hasn’t seen the inside of an apartment with real papered walls since Courfeyrac’s.

“I don’t know where you’re living,” Montparnasse says, throwing his coat over a plush velvet armchair, worn threadbare at the seat, “but if you’ve been frequenting the sorts of places I’ve found you, it can’t be anything much.”

Jehan removes his own coat, wincing as he drags it over his previously injured shoulder. “I can’t say I’d like to know how you afford these rooms.”

“You know my line of work. I’m not cheap.”

There is always something bloody to his smile, something raw even when he simply tosses one back at them and rolls his shoulders coyly.

“Well.” Montparnasse stretches over the length of a yellowing couch, dotted with embroidered red roses. “My former line of work. It was enough to rent this place for a few years. Then, I suppose as a parting gift, a patron of mine purchased it for me. And so here I am, without real work and with more rooms than I need to myself.”

Grantaire looks about, finds no other seats, and forces himself onto the edge of the cushion at Montparnasse’s feet, to a small grunt, but no protest as he elbows his knees aside. “Pleasant for a parting gift.”

“Pleasant. Certainly. The man thinks he owns me most of my career, his wife dies, his daughter and son as well, and he decides that I was close enough to family to throw the money he looted in the aftermath at me and leave the country.”

There is a melancholy in his features there has not been before, the hanging look of an abandoned hound. He stares at his hands as they rest on his knees and pinch the fabric of his trousers.

“You’d rather he hadn’t left?”  
Montparnasse laughs. “I’d rather I’d have put in a knife in his back when I had him close.”

Grantaire knows Jehan has gone pale across the room, is staring at him and waiting for him to speak. It shocks him still that he found the man looking for work as an assassin--still more that he had so readily gone to the barricades as he had, rifle in hand and chanting old republican anthems with the others.

“I would have before,” Montparnasse continues. “Years before. But he was valuable, and...I don’t know if I could have taken him from his daughters. I couldn’t stomach the way he treated them, you understand, but... Never mind.”

Grantaire rests his elbow on the arm of the couch. It creaks precariously under his weight, but holds just steady enough that he is mildly afraid to move once he gets into position. He does not notice Montparnasse gazing up at him once more until the whites of his eyes startle him from the dull, pinkish glow of the parlor.

“Who was he to you?” The venture is cautious at best, and he has little hope of response, but Grantaire cannot pick his fellows apart by looking at them as Montparnasse can. There is something to be said for speaking to them, discerning their character from the way they gesture, where they hesitate, what matters they will and will not touch on, whether they will look him in the eye. And perhaps his current subject has learned this of other men, learned to deaden his features and regulate his voice and never allow them to know any more of him than he would like. It would not surprise Grantaire in the slightest.

“He was my father-in-law, in a manner of speaking,” Montparnasse says. “And he was good money as well. That is all.”

And that is all he will say.

He stands once more. “Gentlemen, I suggest you acquaint yourselves with your quarters. There is a hall just past the china. To your left is your bed, to your right is mine. Whether or not you are accustomed to sharing your space, it will be required unless you plan to sleep in the parlor.”

“We’re quite used to it,” Jehan says.

Montparnasse does not want the story Jehan seems prepared to tell. He picks up his coat again and pushes his slender arms into the overly tailored sleeves. “I am sorry to leave you so soon. But I expect you will be here when I return.”

Jehan takes his place on the couch. “From what?”

“Where I’m going.”

There isn’t a need to say goodbye as he leaves. Greetings and farewells aren’t in his repertoire.

“This is odd, isn’t it?”

Grantaire stretches out over the couch as Jehan tentatively lowers himself into the armchair as if there will be needles rigged beneath the seat cushion. His hair seems almost scarlet in this light. He still rotates his shoulder to make certain something worse hasn’t been done to it.

“Odd?” Grantaire leans his head back against the arm of the couch. “Everything has been strange. I would have noticed if anything even more out of the ordinary had occurred.”

-

He had a violinist’s callouses. They cut into the delicate pads of his fingers, places strings now nestled like water into riverbeds.  When he was a child, they still sliced the skin beneath his nails, and he sat in his father’s armchair sucking at his fingertips until his mouth was coppery with blood, his mother fussing over bandaging them when she finally caught him. They reopened every time some new gentleman with his tall hat and his too-tailored waistcoat and his generous pocketbook sat in the parlor, his wife in skirts that could have taken up an entire couch by themselves, and his father giddly insisted that his son was a perfectly talented musician who would be glad to play them a tune. So he would.

He would gather up the courage to stand before these men and screech out a simple song, the taught filaments stinging his unaccustomed skin until he bowed his head and hurried off to nurse his wounds once more. At times they caught him by the shoulder before he escaped. Their breaths smelled thick with wine, without exception, and they spoke in lilting tones as if cooing over a squalling infant. They smiled, applauded, ruffled his hair, cared nothing for the bloody fingers he hid beneath his jacket or the tears welling behind his well-trained smile. Only great men suffered for their craft, his tutor assured him every week as his strings howled inelegantly beneath his bow. Great men endured. Great men did not drop their sheet music for the second time that day.

By the time his cuts hardened into thick creases, and his bow did not stutter unintelligible notes across his violin, his music was nothing much to the rich men who visited their parlor room. He greeted them like a proper host, and his father spoke of his intent to send him to Paris with a glinting smile and a nod in his direction. That was far more impressive at sixteen. Any mother’s son could play them a song or two on his instrument of choice. But  _ Paris _ \--that was where the real wonder lay. A man could find his fortune in Paris.  He’d find the best and worst men he’d ever know in Paris, and he would keep them all at arm’s length should the day come he needed them. He’d find a mistress to keep him young and studies to make him old.  Paris was a place they’d make a young  Marseillais hold his head up to face the world, straighten his cravat, cut his hair, drink until he was no longer disgusted by the taste of cheap booze. The very name of the city settled deep in his chest until the uneasy quivering of his stomach forced him, with a polite apology, to excuse himself from the conversation.

Talks of Paris brought him, still regaining his bearings, to the marketplace. There--drifting between shops facing out to the open sea, inhaling the sting of salt in the air, loosening the taught ribbon pulling his hair from his face--he could keep Marseille close. He could still take his shoes in his hand and stumble off towards the shore, the gravel aching his heels until the water lapped calmly over his ankles.

“You’re awfully quiet.”

The voice itself barely rose above the caterwauling of hungry birds and the dull crash of the tide against the shore, soft enough almost to be lost amongst them. Its owner sat atop a small outcropping of rocks, and only turned to face him when he received no response.

“Good afternoon.” The boy on the rocks smiled and leapt to his feet. The salt water mist was tangled up in his red hair, which would have framed his face in cloud-like billows if it had not been so dreadfully damp and windblown. “Or is it? You seem perplexed.”

He did not take his eyes off the boy as he clambered down from his perch. His unexpected companion was dressed in little more than an undershirt and an outdated pair of trousers that cinched below his knees.

“Have you ever thought about Paris?” he found himself asking this stranger.

The boy brushed off the seat of his pants. “Of course I’ve thought about Paris. Doesn’t everyone? It’s what the masses aspire to. People retire to Marseille. You don’t retire to Paris. You live in Paris.”

He decided, despite the relative newness of his trousers, to sit, letting the icy water gurgle over his feet. “Do you aspire to Paris?”

Without looking, he knew the boy smiled. “Of course. A great many things happen in Paris. Paris, my friend, is a maelstrom of infinite capacity, sweeping little fragments of all the world up into her great maw, spitting them out when it pleases her. To die in Paris is to die for love, unquestionably.”

“For what love?” he asks.

“For the very love of Paris.” He sidles down next to him. “My name is Jean. Prouvaire. I thought you’d like to know.”

“Enjolras.”

Jean frowned. “That’s your family name. I know, I’ve heard it.”

“Julien, then.”

“You don’t like Julien. And to be frank,  I don’t like Prouvaire. So you can remain Enjolras, and I may remain Jean to you.”

Enjolras came to know many things about Jean Prouvaire in the space of approximately three minutes. He was a tender fourteen years to Enjolras’s sixteen, his family was from the same stock of wealth without nobility, and if it were up to him, he would be in Greece.

“There’s a wonder about it,” he said. “Something ancient in its bones still. I want to look out on the Aegean and feel the towers of Ilium calling for siege in the distance.”

It was not much of a surprise that he carried a leather bound copy of Homer in the crook of his arm. The edges of its gilded pages were warped with what Enjolras presumed were many days like this.

Jean Prouvaire had pianist’s hands and a slight furrow between his brows. He said he preferred the flute, and there was a delicate airiness to him that was far more suited to it. He was a little too eager to observe Enjolras’s own hands, to turn them over and marvel at the sharp angles of his joints. And as he perused the overworked knot of tissue that passed for the knuckle of Enjolras’s index finger, the crease over his nose deepened, and he met his gaze. His eyes were of a strange green, an almost tragic color. Enjolras did not know what he found so terribly sad about them, but he was not certain how anyone could bring themselves to look away once they found them.

“The first thing you mentioned was Paris,” Jean said. “Why Paris?”

Enjolras took his hand back. “I’ll be there within the next year.”

“University? My family wants me to attend one. I don’t know what for.”

“I  _ want  _ to go to Paris. But my family wants me to as well, for their own reasons. It reflects well.”

Jean’s lips turned up. “You’re not a libertine, I can tell. But you have a certain rebellion in you. The sorts of men who desire a touch of Paris are either libertines, revolutionaries, businessmen, thieves, or have a death wish. What do I know? You could be any of those.”

“As could you.” Enjolras grinned in return. “So what are you?”

“A poet. Poets are all of the above.”

“And revolutionaries must take up arms for them all.”

It was callouses that called him to the revolution. Callouses on the hands of the men who grabbed his sleeve for anything he could give, just a handful of sous if he could manage. Callouses of workers who could no longer work. They would work if they wanted, his family scoffed. There was always work to be done, and more callouses to be earned.

And when he could no longer stand the tightness constricting his lungs, the heat building in his temples, he cut deeply into the bread served to him at dinner that night and spat, “Who will buy from them? What money do the people have left once they have earned their bread? They must live, must they not? You and I know as well as the King that even the poor must live, and what does the man do? He does nothing. The price of bread rises, and he sits. They starve, and he feasts. What does it matter to him that there is no money left for the shopkeepers? His people live. And let them live. Let them have their pocket change. Tell them to work for it. God knows they would.”

So he was sent to bed with just that: bread. The incident was never spoken of in polite company. Their son was already frigid, studious, stern, wore his hair long and his coats unbuttoned--god forbid he became a republican as well.

“So you’ll go off to the university, and then what?” Jean rested his book on his knees. “You’ll study how to make tricolors and read your Rousseau and wait for the price of grain to rise again?”

Enjolras dipped his hands into the wet sand and drew circles before the tide washed them away. “I’ll be a lawyer.”

-

Cosette watches her father enter the dining room that evening. His movements are slow, labored, and he groans as he sits at the head of the table. She avoids his eyes when he looks down the table towards her, clutches her skirts at her knees.

“Cosette...”

She shakes her head.

“Cosette,” he repeats. “I... I’m glad you came to dinner this evening. It’s been so quiet without you.”

“I’ve taken my meals with Enjolras,” she says.

“I know, and it’s kind of you to spend so much time with him.”

The stew before her is growing cold. Cosette picks up a crust of bread and gnaws at the edge. She is not sick, she thinks, but her constitution isn’t strong enough for much food. 

He folds his arms over the table. “I know things haven’t been easy for you. And I know I haven’t made them any easier. I wish I could have done more--”

“You lied to me.”

Cosette looks up finally. Her father’s face is slack, his eyes watering, but not yet spilling over. She bites the inside of her lip.

“It’s not...it’s not about Marius,” she says. “I’ve been at your side for every part of my life worth having lived, and you couldn’t trust me enough to tell me who you were, why we were running, any of your life before me.”

“My life before you did not amount to much.”

“Then it should not have been too much to tell me.”

The room is silent except for the faint clinking of her father’s spoon against his bowl. Cosette breathes deeply against the binding of her stays, pushes a curl of hair back from her face.

“Telling me your real name,” she says, “would not have harmed you. I do not hear ‘Jean Valjean’ and think of some evil man. If I would have heard it before, I would have thought only of my father. Perhaps if I had been a young girl then, I’d have thought it a secret only I was allowed to know. A game, of sorts.”

Valjean sighs mournfully, but says nothing.

She grasps her skirts again.“Knowing what you did would not have made me fear you. Knowing you did not trust me is far worse.”

The shaking in her hands is difficult to control, but she cannot let him see it. Her whole body feels numb, except where the blood has rushed to her fingertips as she tightly holds the length of black cloth. And so she lets go of it and stands, pushing back her chair with a quiet screeching sound.

“I love you, papa,” she says, “but I think I need to be alone tonight.”

-

The garden has always looked so very different at night. The ivy, the trees, the roses are all bright and lively in the daylight, a florid blend of colors among tangled the tangled greenery. At night, when the street lights do not touch it, the garden is all shades of blue and white--silvery and dewy as the moonlight that illuminates it.

Cosette, once more in her nightshirt and robe, her feet bare against the damp earth, stands before the stone bench beneath a great, vine-choked tree. She had feared that bench once, before she knew the man whose shadow she saw near it many a late night. And then she had loved it, loved him. Marius Pontmercy was a sweet, quiet young man, dressed darkly except for a bright grin that seldom showed until he laughed. His skin was a tawny amber color, soft when she held his hand and caressed his cheek, and his hair refused to hold a fashionable curl, but shone beautifully under the stars.

She touches the tree bark, her toes grasping the exposed roots for stability. It is still difficult accepting that he will not return to this place. Cosette still wants to believe she will find him sitting there, waiting for her, telling her that her father made a mistake and he’s come back for her. He will blush like he always did, take her hand, kiss the joints of her fingers, laugh nervously as if he’s done something he shouldn’t have. And she’ll smooth down his hair, tease him, not be afraid to really kiss him. But there is the bench before her, and the tree that shaded them from the moon, and the iron bars Marius would never so much slip as stumble through, and she knows that he would still visit nightly if he could.

The bushes on the other side of the fence rustle. Cosette’s throat tightens with a sharp gasp, and she takes a step back from the bench. Silence, for a moment. Then a lyrical bird call, which hits her ears almost harshly. She steps quietly around the other side of the tree, waiting for the noise to sound again. And so it does, just softer than before.

She has been out here too late too many times to mistake it for a real bird.

Her curiosity piqued, she approaches the fence, stopping only when her nose nearly brushes the vines creeping dense upon the black iron. It is not Marius, she does not allow herself to succumb to such foolish notions. But a shape something like a person moves beyond the leaves. It cannot wholly be her imagination. 

Cosette turns back to the house, sees the singular light burning in the window of the upstairs room where Enjolras lies, and Valjean has already carried his candle to give him his medicine. Calling for her father may be wiser now, but it will not appease her.

She considers pulling back the vines, but upon further consideration. she knows any sudden acknowledgment may frighten her visitor away. That in mind, she finds the quietest way she can to sit on the bench, facing the wall of foliage. She knows that whoever lies beyond it may well be doing the same, waiting for an instance that their unseen companion will not run to speak.

Once Cosette is certain they have been there all the while, unmoving, she says softly, “I don’t believe I know you.”

The silence continues. She begins to reconsider, to wonder if she has imagined the whole thing after all, before an equally hushed voice answers her,

“We haven’t met, mademoiselle.”

She takes another glance up at the window. Surely her father won’t be listening.

“Did you know I was here?” she asks.

“Not specifically that you would be in the gardens, no.”

“So you know I--”

“You and your father live here, yes, I know.”

Cosette shifts back on the bench. “Not many people are supposed to know that”  
The voice laughs. “I’m not many people.”

They both pause. She knows this person, whoever they are, has not moved when she begins to speak again. “Can I ask your name? Or see your face, perhaps?”

“Nothing is stopping you from looking at me.”

Cosette squints through the leaves--a profile, maybe, the outline of a stiff collar, a hat. Nothing distinguishable or familiar. She reaches a hand forward to pull back the obstructions, but stops herself short of touching the plants that coil about the iron bars.

“You’ll run if I do,” she says. “You’re giving yourself an opportunity while I’m distracted. For all I know, your face is covered anyhow. Just give me something to call you if you want to stay.”

“Address me as monsieur, if you need to address me as anything.”

She frowns, but no name or face is better than not speaking to him at all. The bushes shift again as the man leans back against them.

“Why are you here?” Cosette folds her hands in her lap. “If I don’t know you, and you don’t know my father, what business do you have?”

A long sigh breaks the humid night air. Her visitor hoards his words, as if he will never get them back if he lets them go. She wants to comfort him. Even with a wall of iron and ivy between them, she knows something is weighing on him.

“A good question,” he says, more of a breath than a phrase. “I happened to be nearby on actual business, and I remembered this place. I...had a meeting on the street out here. With a dear friend of mine.”

Cosette lets her robe fall off her shoulders, rest at the bend of her elbows. It’s too warm for her to replace it. No one will see her in any case.

“Do you know who I am?” she asks.

He scoffs. “Cosette, yes? We’ve never met. But you knew my friend. You knew her quite well.”

“Perhaps you’ve made a mistake. I don’t know terribly many--”

“You knew Eponine.”

It is as if the rest of her interrupted statement drops into her stomach. Cosette remembers almost nothing of Eponine but Montfermeil, nearly frostbitten bare toes, bruised cheeks, aching arms, little on her mind but her next meal if it were possible. She cannot resent Eponine too much for it, but the image of that rosy face, lank blonde hair curled beneath a bonnet--it does not leave her for an instant when she recalls the inn at Montfermeil.

She must have paused longer than she intended, because the man’s voice is tender when he speaks again. “I know the memories must be painful.”

Cosette shakes her head, even though she knows he can’t see her. “I forgave her long ago.”

“I’m not sure you know what happened to her.” He plucks a leaf idly. “She died at one of the barricades. Dressed as a man to blend in, shot too early on to see most of the fighting.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Sorry?”  
“You said she was a friend of yours,” Cosette says. “I understand, it must be difficult. I may not know you, but I sympathize.”

He laughs bitterly. “Thank you. But it’s best you don’t.”

“That I don’t sympathize?”

“That you don’t know me.”

She stands. “I feel you might be about to leave, monsieur.”

“You would be correct,” he says. “I can’t stay long. I didn’t intend to stand here as long as I have.”

A pair of hard-soled shoes walk a few steps, before Cosette reaches through the bars of the gate. He stops.

“Do you have something else to say?”

She shakes the object she holds between her fingers--a straight golden hairpin, adorned with a pearl at the top--and the footsteps come closer again. Another hand drifts near, then stops.

“Why?” he asks.

“I may not know you,” she says, and holds the pin closer to his hand, “but I came here tonight to remember someone I loved, and I will never see him again. Whoever you are, you have lost a person very dear to you as well.”

“That’s no reason to--”

“I never expected anyone to be at the fence again. It might be frivolous, but...there are still people beyond these walls. I think I had forgotten. And I do not need to be in love with them for them to be real. He was not the world.”

He takes the pin delicately, and the night is so hushed that she can hear his hand scrape the inside of his pocket as he puts it in his coat. Through the parted ivy, Cosette glimpses nothing but a sliver of him. Dark hair, a scar that must usually be covered by it slicing vertically up the side of his face, a smirk that she feels is sincere despite his demeanor.

“No one should bother you here,” he says. “The enemy of mine enemy is my friend. I can’t promise anything, I’m supposed to be somewhat inconspicuous myself. But I will try.”

“Your enemy?”

He shakes his head. “You know the police will find this place eventually. Not the whole force, perhaps, but...at least one. Try not to fear him much. He’s a hound, but even hounds lose their teeth.”

She doesn’t hear more from him as he walks away, turning back the way he must have approached the house.

Cosette does not want to admit it, but she has always been afraid of hounds. The only ones she’s known were in Montfermeil, underfed guard dogs that strained their chains to try for a bite at anyone who came too close. She isn’t sure what there was worth guarding in that town, but there they were. Ribs under tight skin and short fur, fangs half rotted and waiting to break on whoever came to threaten their masters’ property. The Thenardiers never kept one, but between them, they did not need to.

She presses close to the fence, watches what she can make out of black against black fading into the night. There is a wish on her lips, to tell the stranger that they will meet again. Even if they will not, perhaps it will take away some of the sting of loneliness she recognizes in him. But the light is burning in Enjolras’s window. She will be expected to return soon, and she will attempt to assure him he is not alone either--he will not believe her. And neither would the man who has already vanished down the street. Before her father can come to the doorway, Cosette lifts the hem of her robe and hurries inside.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> NOTE: This chapter is NSFW in parts and contains some sexual content.

Jehan takes the first fight Montparnasse brings home. His wordless conversation with Grantaire is enough--he touches his shoulder as they both lounge on the couch, looks down at his side, nods. He’d rather Grantaire not waste himself too early, before his wound has had time to mend. But he almost listens to the pang in his chest that tells him to give in when he glances back and sees Grantaire curled despondently in an armchair. He’ll have his time, as Jehan has his, and both will hopefully be brief.

He finds he has slowly grown accustomed to this new Paris. Familiarity hasn’t set in yet; he still struggles to keep Montparnasse in sight to guide him. But the narrow side roads and spaces between buildings are no longer strange. Jehan supposes they will have to be this way, the main streets of Paris will not be kind.

“You seem sentimental.”

Jehan looks down from gazing at the overhanging roofs.

Montparnasse, still facing ahead, continues. “You’re thinking about something.”

“I think a lot,” Jehan says.

“You’re also playing coy.”

Jehan huffs and catches up a few steps. “Alright, you caught me. I’ve been thinking about this job--”

“Whether you’re suited?”

“Whether we’ll be alright.”

At this, Montparnasse pauses a moment. “You’ve taken a job hitting men for money, there is a significant chance you won’t be the only one punching.”

“No, no, I’m aware. I just...I wonder if we’ll be able to live off of it, if we’ll make enough coin to survive, if we’ll be caught.”

Clouds pass over the moon, and the light shines hazy on the road.

“I would have sought someone else,” Montparnasse says, “if I thought either of you incapable. There are unknowable factors, yes, but I have done my best to safeguard against them. The apartment is ours, indubitably. If all else fails, money and food can be obtained in less savory ways.”

“Less...legal, I presume?”

There is a vague growl from Montparnasse. “The fights aren’t _necessarily_ illegal. They’re far more legitimate than my previous business, and I would prefer to be legitimate, but survival is foremost.”

They must be descending towards the river--the air clings to Jehan’s skin and sinks heavy and white at his ankles. He sheds his coat, slings it over one arm.

“It’s difficult imagining you having any desire to be legitimate,” he says.

“The whole idea is foreign, I know.”

Jehan waits for a longer reply, and in receiving none, searches for a question. The faces of the men Montparnasse brought him to are too unfamiliar and briefly seen to pick any specific traits from memory. But there had been a multitude of them, certainly enough to supply any venture Montparnasse was set on.

Finally--not daring to walk beside him, but walking a few paces closer--he asks, “Why seek help?”

“Why do you need to know?”

“You’re playing coy.”

He would sooner believe the laugh that follows comes from some prowler tailing them than Montparnasse himself. Jehan finds the man at his side once the echo dies out, shaking his head and tightening his cravat.

“You’re good, Prouvaire. Quicker than I’d thought. I assumed your type possessed a slower humor--a good one, but opium doesn’t exactly sharpen the mind.”

“Precisely why I quit.”

The smile playing at Montparnasse’s lips is not fierce. It is just that--playing. Pondering. He hums to himself, clicks his tongue, then says,

“Those men wouldn’t have helped.”

“They seemed to defer to you, I’d have thought they’d follow you to hell.”

“If only because the bastards belong there,” he says. “They defer to me because they fear me. Respect is not the same. Respect requires an amount of mutual trust, fear requires trust in yourself.”

“Trust to do what?” Jehan asks.

“To keep those who fear you in line.”

Jehan bites his lower lip. “And you trust us? With the assumption that we trust you?”

“Certainly more than I trust them; you, I believe, would also rather trust me than any of them.”

“Would I?”

Jehan smirks, and doesn’t expect Montparnasse to reciprocate when he does.

“You find me charming. Dishonest, but in possession of certain admirable qualities--qualities that you think may prove useful to your own exploits. If the feeling is not trust at the moment, it is necessity. You need me, I need you. Both of you.”

“And...if something were to happen? To any of us?”

“The other party is summarily arrested, punishment dispensed as befits the nature of previous crimes. I don’t know either of your exact situations, but I imagine that you would be sent to jail, which would be a kindness if you consider what they would do to me.”

Jehan swallows deeply, and he does not consider it.

 

He is growing accustomed to the pain. A certain apathy creeps close behind it--a comfort of sorts , an unfortunate one. There are three rounds of fighting, and Jehan scrapes a win from the final two, with a sore rib cage and aching temples to show for it. Nothing more can be said.

Montparnasse slides the money into one of many hidden pockets that line his coat, gives a brief nod as if to let Jehan know he’ll receive his share when they are not in such dangerous company. But he does not follow him home. Having sipped his wine down to the bottom of the glass, he leans in and whispers over the noise that he’ll be home later, that Jehan should take another road home to avoid anyone who may have followed them. They won’t know which of them is holding the money. he says. But it’s better, for some nebulous reason, that Montparnasse guards it.

It is easy enough to find a path home, once he discerns the proper direction. There is little more to follow home than the tallest buildings rising over the hazy horizon. He is almost grateful for his wayward youth. It has given him a map that seems burned into his skull like a brand, and he feels as if he has taken the same pains for it.

This will become routine, he thinks, for Grantaire to tend him when he enters the apartment.

“Hopefully,” Grantaire says, taking a wad of cloth and dabbing at a small lesion on Jehan’s cheek, “he’s already assumed I’d break into the medicine cabinet. If not, I’ll call it a misunderstanding and take the blame.”

When Grantaire tells him to rest early and easy, he cannot take that advice more quickly. He retires long before he expects Grantaire to, but makes certain to fit himself onto less than half of the mattress. Grantaire will need space, he tells himself--room to heal, not confine himself to a tight, painful space.

It is odd how easily sleep comes to him. The black when he closes his eyes is blacker than the windowless room itself. He can afford to drift and sink into that dark, smothering sea without fear. Breathe deeply and not suffocate. Be cradled by the enveloping water. It is dangerous, perhaps, to sleep here. But the water is cool and vast and inviting, more than it has been in weeks. Jehan curls around the pillow between his knees. He does not wait to drop into sleep.

 

The edge of dawn has turned the outlines of the sitting room pale orange where it is not dull and amaranth. Grantaire takes note of the way the light folds into the places where his clothes are wrinkled. A tangle of hazy lines, he observes. Some natural imperfection cutting through the singular violet. His eyes are too tangled in the contours of sunlight to look up as the door closes.

“You put Prouvaire to bed?” Montparnasse asks.

Grantaire nods. “He wasn’t unwilling. Just stubborn, It’s unlike him to agree to sleep until he’s too exhausted to stay awake.”

“I’d think he went quite readily, then.”

“Was it worth it?” he asks.

Montparnasse drops a small, heavy coin purse onto the side table. When he smiles, that same muted, peach flesh color hits the angles of his face too gently. Grantaire reaches towards the money, but, catching the twitch in Montparnasse’s wrist, decides to leave it be. It is not that he trusts him with it. But if he does not give the illusion that he will at least let him handle it, he may not see any.

“Why did you stay?” he asks.

“At the inn? I didn’t.”

“Not at all?”

“Not long.”Montparnasse sighs. “I finished my drink, finished a few more. And I wasn’t drunk, so I took a bit of a longer path. Meandered a bit. It isn’t important.”

“I suppose not,” Grantaire says.

Montparnasse is at a wood and glass cabinet across the room when he looks up to face him. The piece is elegant in a way the rest of the apartment is not, dark stain accentuating the grooves carved into its face, shelves hosting an organized array of bottles.Without any noise but the clinking of cups, he pours himself a decent serving of wine.

“Care for any?” he asks after a moment’s hesitation.

Grantaire nods, thanks him only when his hand is about the stem of the glass and Montparnasse is busy indecently gulping his own drink. The man does not drink like a connoisseur, pausing to let the wine rest in his mouth and savor the fumes. For the quality of the bottle he’s opened--old, heavy, red stock that prickles the back of the tongue--he consumes it like watered down cognac. It’s almost a shame.

“I never asked you,” Montparnasse asks, “about what happened to your little revolution.”

Grantaire sips his wine. “It wasn’t mine.”

“You’re not going to tell me.”

“I’m assuming you wouldn’t tell me if I asked what you’re so interested for.”

Montparnasse only purses his lips and tips his glass in affirmation.

“I assume you lost someone. The rest of us seem to. Maybe it was more than one.” Grantaire finishes a glass, walks across the room to pour another--his host does not stop him. “But you cope poorly, as the rest of us seem to. You and I drink. I lie awake and dwell on the infinite number of things I have done incorrectly over the course of my life that brought me to this one ultimate stain on my existence, only comforted by the fact that I can allow myself to think that the whole affair was as insignificant in the course of human history as crushing and smearing an ant on a page of an encyclopedia. This is not a satisfying source of comfort, but it is less suffocating than believing that I contributed to the ruin of civilization. You...you don’t tell me what you do, because it would allow me a speck of insight, and you wish to remain closed off. To me, especially, for some reason that I would not know, as I am not permitted.”

“You aren’t.”

“But you’re letting me see you drink.”

Montparnasse laughs. “It’s not that complicated. I drink, I smoke, I fuck. I’d be rolling a pinch of tobacco right now if I didn’t worry about burning the place down. Or if I bothered to buy any.”

Grantaire places his drink on the table and reaches into the pocket of his coat, finding the small metal box in his pocket warm from resting so close to his body. “Do you have your own papers?”

He opens the box as Montparnasse takes out a small bundle of rolling papers, then fills one with a significant chunk of dry tobacco from Grantaire’s stash.

“I hope you have--” he begins, the end of the cigarette between his teeth, unable to finish before Grantaire offers a match as well.

Montparnasse grins. His angles flicker between soft and devilish in the pinprick of fire, and he does not wait for Grantaire to offer the match before he leans in and lights the end of his cigarette. A whiff of smoke catches in Grantaire’s throat, but he keeps from coughing as Montparnasse inhales and exhales a puff of white.

“You aren’t worried about burning the apartment, then?” he asks.

“The concern was secondary to not having anything to smoke.” Montparnasse taps the smoldering remains of ash into an empty wine bottle.

Grantaire refrains from partaking. He drinks as long as Montparnasse seems indifferent to it, observes him silently smoking and pacing.

“So.” He stands, swirls his wine. “It’s that simple? You drink, you smoke, you fuck? It doesn’t seem like much of a secret.”

“It isn’t. It just wasn’t yours to know.”

“Until you wanted me to?”

“You seem to have tried the method yourself, with a bit of added self loathing.”

Grantaire scoffs. “Not the fucking.”

“Don’t tell me you haven’t tried.”

He does not like to think of the night Jehan kissed him, but it was an attempt--not much of one, but it cannot be disregarded. And it _had_ felt good, for a moment, if he closed his eyes and forgot his history with the man before him. If he was not Jehan, he was just another pair of lips and arms and legs and a chest pressed to his.

“You sound like you want me to,” he says.

“I wouldn’t be opposed.”

Grantaire sets his empty glass down. “This from the man who told me he was keeping things from me not ten minutes ago.”

“I never said I was keeping everything from you.” Montparnasse snuffs his cigarete between his fingers. “If I wanted you to, we could. No obligations, it would only be as many times as you wanted. Neither of us has to acknowledge it.”

His own brow creases as Grantaire’s does, and he tilts his head back.

“If this is about anyone you lost,” he says, “then I assure you it is for me as well. They won’t be coming back for us. Take what you can when you can, I’d advise.”

Grantaire swallows deeply. “Fine, then.”

“‘Fine’ as in ‘you’ve deeply upset me and I’m not interested any longer’ or as in ‘sex sounds at least somewhat agreeable?’”

“The second option. If you’re pleasant enough.”

Montparnasse drapes his coat neatly over the armchair. Follows with his waistcoat, his cravat, until he faces Grantaire in only his crisp, white, untucked undershirt.

“ _Can_ you be pleasant?” Grantaire says.

The floorboards groan as Montparnasse strides across the room, undoing the front panel of his trousers and kicking off the strap beneath his heel. When he reaches Grantaire, grips his thighs with his knees, only his shoes and stockings remain below his waist.

“That,” he says, “is up to you. Go on, do what you want, decide.”

“Why the sudden change?”

He sighs “It’s simple, isn’t it? I want to not think for awhile. I’m not asking for the throes of passion, make it quick and hard and I’ll be satisfied. Are you going to undress or not?”

“You’ve beaten me to it,” Grantaire mutters. “By quite a lot.”

“Then you can finish the job for me. You’ve undone a corset, yes?”

Grantaire reaches under Montparnasse’s shirt. His fingers search the crisscrossing laces and the eyelets until he finds the Gordian knot that pulls it all tight, and it is far easier to unlace these things with no barmaid shoving their faces together. Montparnasse impatiently casts it aside once the laces are loose enough to pull through the eyelets.

Grantaire lets him deal with his shirt, there are too many pieces to consider, and Montparnasse is a peculiar sort when it comes to clothing. But the article is simply unbuttoned at the neck and pulled over his head, another trifle in his way. The linen binding his chest comes off soon after, his shoes shaken off onto the floor with the rest of the clothing.

“I don’t suppose,” Grantaire says, “you’d want me to undress as well?”

“Not as if it’d be difficult, you only have one layer.”

It’s true enough--he hasn’t dressed save for trousers and and an undershirt. Only Montparnasse sitting astride his legs poses any problem for quick removal.

“I imagine you aren’t too impressed,” he says.

“Doesn’t matter.”

Montparnasse kisses bitter and indignant and grasping at skin instead of fabric. There is a force pent up in his neck that pushes Grantaire’s head back. Grantaire can only try his usual tricks. He clasps each side of Montparnasse’s ribs, moving his hands to cup his breasts in the space between his thumbs and forefingers. The tension in his shoulders seizes a moment, then releases as Grantaire moves his hands slowly across his skin. His chest muscles are taught and overworked, defined in that unreal way the smooth, marble skin of statues clings to their internal structures of unhewn stone. He moves his mouth down until his teeth scrape Montparnasse’s neck, his hands massaging his chest until his breath is short.

Between strained, but content hums, Montparnasse grips a handful of Grantaire’s hair and whispers, “Perhaps we should...spare the poor couch.”

“I would carry you, but--”

“Don’t make this sentimental.” Montparnasse pries himself away and stands. His face is flushed at its highest points, as are his shoulders. “You aren’t looking for love, and neither am I. If we’re still agreed, you seem to know what you’re doing, and you can follow me.”

“To your bedroom?” Grantaire asks,

“Prouvaire is already asleep in yours. Wouldn’t be too kind to wake him.”

There is little shame in leaving their garments behind. Grantaire trails behind him, down the hall, into the unlit space Montparnasse slinks into when his work is done. He cannot find him again until the tip of a match illuminates the angles of his body, then lends its flame to a nearby candle.

“You had matches,” Grantaire says.

Montparnasse laughs. “Yours were closer than mine.”

There is a strangeness to his form in the chiaroscuro of candle-lit darkness. Perhaps it is simply born of unfamiliarity. Old scars carve odd curves into his skin, and his body is shaped by cold and hunger and yet more brutal things. But it is as fine as his face. Fitting, for a man whose vanity is more a sin than his pride.

Grantaire lies back on the bed.“Why bother with the light?”

“You ought to see where you’re putting things. Can’t have you fumbling about. I’ll close my eyes if the view isn’t pleasant enough.”

Before Grantaire can speak again, Montparnasse places himself over him again, presses a hand down against his chest to steady himself. The insides of his thighs are tight on Grantaire’s legs. He arches his back and bends to kiss him hard once more, his hips rocking slowly. Grantaire anchors himself, palms resting on Montparnasse’s jaw and fingers tangling in his hair, to match the rhythm.

It is no matter when the candle burns out. Grantaire knows their anatomies well enough, has traced his hands and mouth across Montparnasse’s figure like a student frantically reading his notes over and over once more. And when it is dawn, and when they have not quit the field, he voices no complaint. Montparnasse will tell him when there is more important business.

 

-

 

“A damn pity,” he hears one man say as he turns heel to leave the station. He has not been addressed, he should not listen. Yet, he cannot help overhearing.

“You ever heard of that?” says a young officer with a provincial accent. “Nearly beat them to firing him. Told the prefect he’d failed, just admitted it. Suppose it was lucky, he was planning on releasing him anyway.”

There are no private exchanges in these halls, nor should there be. Words here are fated to echo, to reach the ears of the lowest officers and the highest officials. It is for the best. To carry a secret, a lie--one in the same--is to risk one’s commitment, to jeopardize justice itself. Justice is honest. It is fair. It does not hide.

He bows his head as he exits the building. Fealty, he supposes. He is not worthy of raising his chin to meet the eyes of the city he has failed to serve. There are few ways to atone now, and none would undo what he has done--what he has not done. The dead are buried until Judgment Day. He can only wait with them. God may render his sentence, but Paris will hold him until his trial.

Without his uniform, the urchins scattering in the morning still leave a wide berth ahead of him. The boys with their stolen bread are not above the law, no, but the law is something he cannot wield in good faith. It is as if they sense this--their running slows, and some turn over their shoulders to watch him.

There can be no resolution. The convict performed one good deed: he allowed him to live. His intentions were both clear and baffling. To spare the life of one’s pursuer must be an honorable thing, must be worth something, paying off the price of a chateau with pocket change. The debt is too high to chase with small investments.

The musty smell of the river envelops him as he crosses the bridge. There is something rancid about the embankments here. He avoids them when he can--only he and God know what sorts of people he’s found there on evening patrols.  His wrists still ache, and his head pounds where some young man among many struck him. The bruises are not hidden well by his close-cropped hair, or his rolled sleeves. There won’t be many to hide them from in the privacy of his home.

A woman clutches her scant shawl to her chest as he passes, and the voices of two unseen companions behind her laugh. They know better than to solicit him now. But stripped of his uniform, his authority, he must seem a humorous sight to them. One steps from the shadows to push up her breasts and purse her lips at him, and the first pulls her back to slap her wrist. They are a more competent officer’s problem.

He has failed here. He knows this as he shuts the door of his apartment and finds the bare mattress from which he rose this morning. His service is not done, it cannot be. But it is finished here. Paris cannot benefit any longer from him--it pains him to think that he must leave, this city has been good to him. Perhaps justice has turned from this place, truly. Or perhaps that is selfish and wistful; it has only turned from him.

**Author's Note:**

> An AU that started as a sleep deprived musing and has since gotten away from me entirely. Find me at charlatanreyes on tumblr, if you feel like it. Thank you all for reading!


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